I've seen diagrams which seem to show this in my GoF Design Patterns book, but it doesn't say what the type of diagram is, and I can't see any templates of use in Visio 2003. I hope it's not under UML.

Any hints?

http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/stateMachineDiagram.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_diagram

ManipUni said:

That stuff is fun in school. Nobody knows anything about it in real life, yet everyone gets by...

Err.. not quite nobody. Many US corporations for which I've worked over the last ~10 years use UML; Class and Sequence Diagrams especially - Use Case/Activity Diagrams sometimes. The larger the development team, the more useful they seem - especially for communicating (at least) design intent. However, the quality supporting tools tend(ed) to be expensive and without them the effort does not seem cost effective - IMHO.

ManipUni said:

That stuff is fun in school. Nobody knows anything about it in real life, yet everyone gets by...

Indeed, I'm developping a project with some other people spread all over the country and our UML diagrams make sure everybody working on the project has a clear view of what we are making.

Also it helps devide the work to know who is working on witch part. Ones you have the UML diagram coding it takes less time... And even maintaining your code is easy for everybody who can read the diagram.

TommyCarlier said:

Not really development-related: the Denzel Washington Venn Diagram.

Hehe... that's awesome!

There are 2 different diagrams which you could be wanting:

1) A State Diagram = Tracks a programs persistent state as the program executes, in a stepwise manner

2) A Control flow graph = A hierarchical logical way to mind map how the program should function

For the GoF book, they mainly use control flow graphs, having the function encapsulate other functions to hand control into other defined objects.

For tools on how to create them, there are 2 I've been having fun with lately, Visio 2010 which is in a free Beta right now, and Visual Studio 2010 also has UML modeling capabilities.  You can currently create UML diagrams from existing code now, but you can't yet create skeleton templates of code from the UML diagrams you create(yet).

So those two programs would be my suggestions.

HeavensRevenge said:

Hello there, funny enough you had me pull out my GoF book just to be sure, and guess to what you are referring to, because you didn't really ask the question clearly... but I'll attempt to answer.

 

There are 2 different diagrams which you could be wanting:

1) A State Diagram = Tracks a programs persistent state as the program executes, in a stepwise manner

2) A Control flow graph = A hierarchical logical way to mind map how the program should function

 

For the GoF book, they mainly use control flow graphs, having the function encapsulate other functions to hand control into other defined objects.

 

For tools on how to create them, there are 2 I've been having fun with lately, Visio 2010 which is in a free Beta right now, and Visual Studio 2010 also has UML modeling capabilities.  You can currently create UML diagrams from existing code now, but you can't yet create skeleton templates of code from the UML diagrams you create(yet).

 

So those two programs would be my suggestions.

 

Out our company we recently started a special interest group just for the purpose of designing these diagrams.

We use Enterprise Architect

UML 2.0 compliant and it hosts a lot of stuff. But beware UML knowlidge is needed!

We looked into VS 2010, but it doesnt suit our needs. You cant nest elements.