Groups of people working in concert perform most commercial, industrial or in-house software development. These groups are often quite diverse. This panel brings together object-oriented consultants and developers as well as practitioners and researchers interested in human factors and user-centered design, project management and technical writing. The panel will address the question, "To successfully complete today's projects, does object-oriented development as practiced today do an adequate job of supporting ALL of the participants who must collaborate?"

The Unified Method was launched by Grady Booch and Jim Rumbaugh at an OOPSLA'95 Conference Fringe meeting organised by Rational Software Corporation. In 1996 Unified Method was re-scoped to a notation, and renamed Unified Modeling Language (UML).Earlier this year, UML was submitted to Object Management Group for standardisation and has been endorsed by Microsoft, IBM, HP, Platinum Technologies, ObjectTime and many other corporations. No wonder UML is leading contender as de facto standard notation for object-oriented analysis and design.The panel will take a sanity check, and will go beyond hype and newsgroup flames and attempt to form an objective view of UML and its prospects.The members of panel have been working closely with UhL in many different roles, including that of UML language designer, end-user, consultant, CASE tool expert, and object-oriented methodologist. The discussion will focus on how LJML matches up in practice against one of its original. raisons d'etre as the language of blueprints for software.Specific issues to be addressed include:• What is advantage of UML over existing OOA/D notations?• Can UML be used on real projects today?• Is language sufficiently simple, and well-enough defined, to become de facto standard?• Will UML lead to improved OOA/D methods and CASE tools?• What is importance of meta-model in UML?