Katie Lucas on RUP. I'm pleased to see this little essay because it seems like too many people behave as if they didn't already know this. On multiple occasions, I've taken a class or read a book purporting to be about OO design (or data modelling or process modelling), only to spend weeks learning how to describe a design in a standardized diagram notation, and learning nothing about how to come up with the design in the first place. I even convinced myself I was supposed to be learning about good design from the notation itself, somehow, since that's all they were teaching. I expect good classes and books to address the notation, like a computer science program needs to teach a programming language, but I've been burned by misplaced emphasis (or at least bad course descriptions).