Similar in spirit to software-design patterns, these UML components are catalogued with short prose descriptions and illustrated with UML. The detail here is often impressive, though the type is necessarily small. (Fortunately, the CD-ROM contains all these diagrams--including Java source code--for use within your own designs.) The authors--all experts in UML--have done the heavy lifting here. The idea is to incorporate these components within your own projects.

Besides a catalog of expert components, this book describes the authors' Feature-Driven Development (FDD) software-design process. (While there is one UML standard, design processes still proliferate.) FDD touts good productivity with a minimum of overhead. The authors argue that it can be used productively within today's ever-shorter business cycles.