Concurrent Class Machines are a novel state-machine model that directly captures a variety of object-oriented concepts, including classes and inheritance, objects and object creation, methods, method invocation and exceptions, multithreading and abstract collection types. The model can be understood as a precise definition of UML activity diagrams which, at the same time, offers an executable, object-oriented alternative to event-based state-charts. It can also be understood as a visual, combined control and data flow model for multithreaded object-oriented programs. We first introduce a visual notation and tool for Concurrent Class Machines and discuss their benefits in enhancing system design. We then equip this notation with a precise semantics that allows us to define refinement and modular refinement rules. Finally, we summarize our work on generation of optimized code, implementation and experiments, and compare with related work.