Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 22. Building Software Development Diagrams

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Choosing the right software template

• Constructing COM and OLE diagrams

• Creating data flow diagrams

• Creating Jackson system network diagrams

• Creating Jackson data structure and program structure diagrams

• Building enterprise architecture diagrams

• Documenting program structure

• Modeling real-time systems with ROOM

• Prototyping user interfaces

Whether or not you use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to model a software system, other types of software diagrams come in handy for designing and documenting software architecture, program structure, and memory management. In addition to the UML Model Diagram template, Visio Professional includes several additional software templates for visualizing your system based on other software development methodologies.

The software templates described in this chapter help you document your software systems with diagrams—but they don't produce a model like the one that the UML Model Diagram template offers. The good news is that basic Visio techniques are all you need to construct these software diagrams: dragging and dropping, gluing with connectors, dragging control handles, applying shape data, and using the occasional configuration command from shortcut menus. The bad news is that, like many other Visio templates, these templates don't check whether your software diagrams conform to the rules and notations of the software methodologies they represent. Nor do they offer an opinion on whether ...