I (I should say we) have used UML class diagrams to build object oriented systems. The class diagrams are something a reasonably sophisticated, but non-program

I (I should say we) have used UML class diagrams to build object oriented systems. The class diagrams are something a reasonably sophisticated, but non-programmer, person can understand, so they can participate in the design phase. Of course there's lots that comes after that design phase, but it set the stage. In case it's of interest, the things we were modeling were bilingual dictionaries, and morphology and phonology (linguistics), all of which had a ton of structure we needed to model.