Question

What diagramming technique(s) do you use while programming to help you or others understand your program or design. I am not talking about a person’s favorite tool, though a good tool probable helps a person greatly with diagramming.

My intent in this question is to find the simple useful diagramming techniques people actually use and find new ones to learn.

Do you use flow-charts, Data Flow Diagrams, ER diagrams, etc?

The web is full of recommendations! But what do real programmers, designers, and code maintainers actually use in their day to day work.

Thanks for your feedback

Answer 1

• Very High Level Discussion – Context Diagrams where the boxes might represent classes, packages, or sub-systems.
• High Level Design – Sequence diagrams which show the interface between sub-systems, still no classes directly used but may be implied from this.
• Detailed Design – Sequence diagrams which are at the class level.

If there is a tricky algorithm for something such as the correlation of multiple data streams into a new stream then I will generally use a Flow Chart to work out the algorithm.

If the solution requires knowledge of state then a State diagram is also used.

Those are the ones I use most.

When doing Data Warehouse design I draw Star Schemas to work out how to store the data. When doing Transactional DB design I use Entity Relationship diagrams to work our data storage.

When designing a UI I just sketch it out. Once I start to get some parts of the UI worked out and want to play with some areas I will make a template, print out a copy copies and then use that as a guide to work on sub-sections. For colour schemes, it can be handy to make a graphic using the gimp and have layers for each piece of the design and then play with the layers colouring each one to find the right balance.