due to a recent happening it has come to my attention that the people in my class have the subtle arts of designing a function before you start so i would like to spend a post providing a lunch point to enable student’s, to make there own Research into the area.
the ability to explain what a Application, program or function works step works can be quite important, when working as part of a team or working on a large system or both, this skill is more of an art than science.
there are many types of diagramming that can be used to assists in the design the information system and and the one ones that i am going to talk about are;
+ Mind maps
+ Context diagram
+ Flow diagram
Mind maps are now the preferred way (by many) of allowing a single person or a team to create a way to brake down the information into bite size chunks a mind map can be a ‘living document’ (the document can be updated during development), there are many software packages and some support muli-user interface. at the start of the project can contain notes on what the client want and by the end of the project the mind map would be filled with notes both technical and non-technical (1),(6).
while a mind map can have and handle Charts, Pictures and images as well as text on the life cycle of a project the layers upon layer of information would lead to to large and heavy mind map (1), (2).
a Context diagram is a method of detaining the accesses need of the system, an example would be a Cash point that would need to accesses the Cash point accesses card database, the accounting database and diagnostic/security software. the context diagram is designed to be as simple as possible. the context diagram is used generally used to define the connection on the developing system in relation too other systems and to show the general flow of data though input (3).
Flow diagram is a simple method of working the process of each function and this can be broken down into each logical step of the fiction. The strength of this system is that there is no needed to choose the language or technology required the project this enables an amount of technical planing to take place with out doing much
while there are others diagramming systems that incorporate outer systems such as UML i have not discussed because they are there own system development paper work while the systems i have explained here are compatible with many Project management systems such as Pairing, Scrum and many agile Development methodology.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map
2) http://drichard.org/mindmaps/
3) http://ifs.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Books/SE7/Presentations/PPT/ch8.ppt
4) http://www.uml.org/
5) http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
6) http://www.mindmeister.com
7) http://airccse.org/journal/ijsea/papers/1010ijsea6.pdf
– Stuff that can be used
a) http://www.gliffy.com/
b) https://www.lucidchart.com
c) https://bubbl.us/
d) https://www.draw.io
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