Flowchart
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I really like the open source DIA, updated recently http://live.gnome.org/Dia[^]
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What flowhcarting programs do people here like to use?
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whiteboard
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
+1 Whiteboard. Then digital camera pic. If I need to include it in my documentation, then I will redraw in Visio, but only for pieces that ABSOLUTELY NEED to be modeled to be understood. Flowcharts are useful in some scenarios, never for all.
Proudly drinking the finest Maryland craft beer. Visiting Maryland for business? First round is on me!
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I really like the open source DIA, updated recently http://live.gnome.org/Dia[^]
Thanks for the link, I'll give it a try. I used to use Visio at my last job but this place won't spend any money so I have to use (gulp) Paint. The worst tool for flow diagrams ever.
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What flowhcarting programs do people here like to use?
The best flow charting tool I have used is AllClear."[^]"> You write a flow chart script and the tool figures out how to design and draw the flowchart. It usually manages not to do "crossovers" and will connect multipage charts. You can crank out flow charts in no time at all. Since you have the script that created the flow chart you can use it as a document for people who don't do flowcharts. It's not free, not cheap, but then nothing that is any good is. It can reverse engineer the script if the flow chart is modified.
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Those cool little plastic stencil template thingies that you can draw the charts by hand with!!
I don't have ADHD, I have ADOS... Attention Deficit oooh SHINY!! Booger Mobile Blog Booger Mobile - Official Camp Quality esCarpade Entrant Page
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+1 Whiteboard. Then digital camera pic. If I need to include it in my documentation, then I will redraw in Visio, but only for pieces that ABSOLUTELY NEED to be modeled to be understood. Flowcharts are useful in some scenarios, never for all.
Proudly drinking the finest Maryland craft beer. Visiting Maryland for business? First round is on me!
IMO the value of a flowchart lies mainly within the actual process of standing up & drawing it. My w/b prints so I sometimes pin a printout on the pin board behind my monitor to reference whilst I'm implementing it. The problem I have with things like Visio, is that they have to be kept in synch with the implementation. This is usually another post implementation make work task. Eventually the files will fall out of synch with the implementation anyway.
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
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Why? Flow charts are pretty much only useful to the person that created them, and that's even suspect. The problem is keeping everything at the same level while still trying to keep it on the page - and without criss-crossing (nearly impossible). Discourage their use by anyone around you, and your life will be soooooo much better!
You are here - through no fault of mine!
Sorry, but this just indicates that you don't know how to use flowcharts properly... and that your coding isn't structured. Properly structured code *never* has any difficulty being drawn without crossing lines (assuming competent drawing). Spaghetti code, not so much. Keeping everything at the same level requires discipline, but then so does writing good, bug-free, code. Trouble keeping a flowchart on one page indicates functions that are too large, that do too much. Divide and conquer. I don't use a flowcharting program because I have never found one that's specifically designed for structured code. It makes a big difference. I started to write one, but decided that the investment of my time was too great and abandoned it. If I thought the market for a good flowcharting program was significant I would have pursued it, but in my experience very few programmers use flowcharts and I thought that was too great a barrier to marketplace success. For me, a flowchart isn't a tool to document what's been coded (past tense), but to help design optimal code first, and additionally to make it easier to understand and debug. Consequently, the flowchart must be easily updatable as the code is debugged or otherwise modified. The various "flowcharting" programs I've seen are for generic drawings. Simply tossing in a few flowcharting shapes is worthless to me. A competent flowcharting program must have an underlying model of a structured program. In other words, you wouldn't use diamonds or rectangles and connecting line primitives, you would use if-then or do-while or switch constructs, for example. Their structure is implicit. Keeping lines from crossing is automatic and trivial. A superior flowcharting program will be able to parse a source code file and produce a flowchart from it. That makes it easy to keep documentation up to date. Unfortunately, I have never found any commercial program that does that. (I wrote one for myself, but that's another story.) A superior flowcharting program will also be able to generate source code from the flowchart. That also makes it easy to keep documentation in sync with program. A really superior flowcharting program will allow debugging a program from the flowchart rather than from the source code... such a program would allow never having to look at source code any more than programmers have to look at the assembly code produced by a compiler or the object code produced by an assembler now. With a flowcharting program like that (it would actually be an in
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What flowhcarting programs do people here like to use?
Might want to check out http://creately.com/[^]
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IMO the value of a flowchart lies mainly within the actual process of standing up & drawing it. My w/b prints so I sometimes pin a printout on the pin board behind my monitor to reference whilst I'm implementing it. The problem I have with things like Visio, is that they have to be kept in synch with the implementation. This is usually another post implementation make work task. Eventually the files will fall out of synch with the implementation anyway.
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
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What flowhcarting programs do people here like to use?
I don't flowchart in public. At my first programming job after college, I was laughed at by the whole programming department for flowcharting a large application I was designing. As if flowcharts were crutches needed by noobs, and real programmers don't need a flowchart.
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Sorry, but this just indicates that you don't know how to use flowcharts properly... and that your coding isn't structured. Properly structured code *never* has any difficulty being drawn without crossing lines (assuming competent drawing). Spaghetti code, not so much. Keeping everything at the same level requires discipline, but then so does writing good, bug-free, code. Trouble keeping a flowchart on one page indicates functions that are too large, that do too much. Divide and conquer. I don't use a flowcharting program because I have never found one that's specifically designed for structured code. It makes a big difference. I started to write one, but decided that the investment of my time was too great and abandoned it. If I thought the market for a good flowcharting program was significant I would have pursued it, but in my experience very few programmers use flowcharts and I thought that was too great a barrier to marketplace success. For me, a flowchart isn't a tool to document what's been coded (past tense), but to help design optimal code first, and additionally to make it easier to understand and debug. Consequently, the flowchart must be easily updatable as the code is debugged or otherwise modified. The various "flowcharting" programs I've seen are for generic drawings. Simply tossing in a few flowcharting shapes is worthless to me. A competent flowcharting program must have an underlying model of a structured program. In other words, you wouldn't use diamonds or rectangles and connecting line primitives, you would use if-then or do-while or switch constructs, for example. Their structure is implicit. Keeping lines from crossing is automatic and trivial. A superior flowcharting program will be able to parse a source code file and produce a flowchart from it. That makes it easy to keep documentation up to date. Unfortunately, I have never found any commercial program that does that. (I wrote one for myself, but that's another story.) A superior flowcharting program will also be able to generate source code from the flowchart. That also makes it easy to keep documentation in sync with program. A really superior flowcharting program will allow debugging a program from the flowchart rather than from the source code... such a program would allow never having to look at source code any more than programmers have to look at the assembly code produced by a compiler or the object code produced by an assembler now. With a flowcharting program like that (it would actually be an in
david_f_knight wrote:
Sorry, but this just indicates that you don't know how to use flowcharts properly... and that your coding isn't structured.
I am not sure why you wanted to make the personal attack, but the rest of your post reinforces my position: Useful flowcharting is next to impossible and NOT worth the hassle. GFY
You are here - through no fault of mine!
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Thanks for the link, I'll give it a try. I used to use Visio at my last job but this place won't spend any money so I have to use (gulp) Paint. The worst tool for flow diagrams ever.
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What flowhcarting programs do people here like to use?
Check out Project // Draw[^] It's completely Web 2.0, free and pretty slick. You can also look at Giffy[^], but it's hard to tell if they have a free version.
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david_f_knight wrote:
Sorry, but this just indicates that you don't know how to use flowcharts properly... and that your coding isn't structured.
I am not sure why you wanted to make the personal attack, but the rest of your post reinforces my position: Useful flowcharting is next to impossible and NOT worth the hassle. GFY
You are here - through no fault of mine!
It wasn't my intent to attack you personally, for the sake of attacking you. The fact that I replied to your posting makes it personal to you. I replied to your posting because I disagree with what you wrote. Making a posting in a public forum makes it fair game for criticism, but I have nothing against you personally. The tone of my reply was not rude. I did consider changing the sentence you quoted before posting it, but decided against doing so because your overall posting was broadly general. If you had urged programmers to discourage the use of currently available flowcharting programs, that would have been one thing (and I can't say I'd disagree). But you didn't write that. You urged programmers to discourage the use of flowcharting entirely. That's an attack on how some programmers have found to do their work more effectively. Who are you to tell other programmers how they ought to do their work? Live by the sword, die by the sword. I don't tell you you ought to use flowcharts, so don't tell me I ought not use them. If you don't like looking at other programmers' flowcharts, then don't look at them. Problem solved! But if they find them helpful for whatever reason, then that's fine, too. And both of your postings indicate that you really don't understand the proper use of flowcharts! That's not intended as an attack, it's intended as a relevant observation because relatively uninformed opinions aren't as credible as better informed opinions. -- david_f_knight
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It wasn't my intent to attack you personally, for the sake of attacking you. The fact that I replied to your posting makes it personal to you. I replied to your posting because I disagree with what you wrote. Making a posting in a public forum makes it fair game for criticism, but I have nothing against you personally. The tone of my reply was not rude. I did consider changing the sentence you quoted before posting it, but decided against doing so because your overall posting was broadly general. If you had urged programmers to discourage the use of currently available flowcharting programs, that would have been one thing (and I can't say I'd disagree). But you didn't write that. You urged programmers to discourage the use of flowcharting entirely. That's an attack on how some programmers have found to do their work more effectively. Who are you to tell other programmers how they ought to do their work? Live by the sword, die by the sword. I don't tell you you ought to use flowcharts, so don't tell me I ought not use them. If you don't like looking at other programmers' flowcharts, then don't look at them. Problem solved! But if they find them helpful for whatever reason, then that's fine, too. And both of your postings indicate that you really don't understand the proper use of flowcharts! That's not intended as an attack, it's intended as a relevant observation because relatively uninformed opinions aren't as credible as better informed opinions. -- david_f_knight
The gist of your replies have been that I have limited capacity to do both programming and flowcharting. Yet somehow you don't seem to think that's a personal attack. And that has nothing to do with whether I caught your tone. I know my criticism of flow charting is open to public opinion. I've been utilizing chats, message boards, forums and news groups for well over twenty years - and never anonymously (You know my real name, and can find out quite a bit of my biography on this site.). Your first reply talks about having a difficult time finding a good tool, and that you never followed through on an attempt to create your own. I took that to mean that flowcharting is difficult (one of MY criticisms of flowcharting). I have had both formal and informal education on flowcharting. I have used them, and I have had coworkers try to make me use them. So I do have some experience. In reality, a useful flowchart takes about twice as long to generate as the actual code. That translates into time and money for EVERYONE. That's a real good reason to discourage their use. And though I blatantly told everyone to discourage their use, the people that know when they are useful and how to create them will continue to use them as needed. So far, I've been able to respond without pointing out any of your deficiencies, but that's getting harder and harder to do. So tell me now what knowledge I am lacking, or how badly I must do my job, or how I don't understand forums...
You are here - through no fault of mine!
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Thanks for the link, I'll give it a try. I used to use Visio at my last job but this place won't spend any money so I have to use (gulp) Paint. The worst tool for flow diagrams ever.
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I don't flowchart in public. At my first programming job after college, I was laughed at by the whole programming department for flowcharting a large application I was designing. As if flowcharts were crutches needed by noobs, and real programmers don't need a flowchart.
