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Some organizations use them extensively in combination with a software development methodology to progress from initial specification to an implementation plan and to communicate that plan to an entire team of developers and stakeholders. Using a modeling language is easier than actual programming, because there are fewer means of actually verifying the proper behaviour of the model. This also means real-life interactions between program parts can deliver nasty surprises later in the development when the model is actually translated into software.

Some Object-Oriented methodologists identify three roughly chronological "generations" of object modeling techniques:

• In the first generation, isolated methodologists and small groups developed techniques that solved problems they saw first-hand in OO development projects. In the generation are included people and techniques such as Rumbaugh , Jacobson , Booch, CRC, Formal methods, Shlaer-Mellor , and Yourdon-Coad .
• The second generation recognized that many best practices were scattered among the fragmented OO methodology landscape. Several attempts were made to gather these practices into coherent frameworks such as FUSION . However, the OO community was beginning to recognize the benefits that industry standardization would bring: not just a good way of doing things, but the good way, which would lead to common parlance and practice among developers.
• The third generation consists of credible attempts at this single industry-standard language, with UML the primary example.

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