Are any of you using the UML in a serious way as part of your development & documentation process? If so, did you learn it through self teaching? courses? seminars/conferences?

Where have you seen the most benefit from it? Faster development time? Fewer bugs? Easier maintenance? More appropriate functionality in the developed app?

Where does it help the most? Class/objects? States? Processes? Deployment? Use cases? Interactions?

Thanks.