simondelliott

Technical architecture drawings

Firstly I am a big fan of pen and paper.  A blank sheet is the best tool for a clear mind.

Secondly, index cards …. I use these almost every time that I am designing, you can CRC card with then, you can story card with them, you can plan a presentation with them, you can use them to carry water, you can support heavy objects with them …

For flow diagrams or software component diagrams I deliberately try to keep it simple and just use shapes in Visio, or Open Office.

I do however have a large number of shapes that I have made over the years, its a good idea to start collecting these as and when you make them. It really cuts down the time to make a diagram if you have a good libuary.

After a traditional flow diagram, the diagram that I find best describes a step by step procedure is a sequence diagram.

These diagrams are great for both software and people process and can often help to find glitches that cannot be seen with a traditional boxes and lines style flow diagram. I also find that when you talk someone through your thoughts with a sequence diagram, it really gets them to lean forward and understand the concept that you are trying to convey. I used to just draw these with either Visio or a proper drawing package (Flash, illustrator or Photoshop), but now I use umbrelo.

I recommend to any professional that uses diagrams to convey complex ideas, that they simply learn the standard drawing package, which is adobe illustrator. It is reasonably accessible to the beginner, but it can go much, much further.

Your diagrams will look much better
and as diagram styles change faster than drawing packages, over your whole career you will have less learning to do.

I prefer to use a wiki to publish the diagrams so that when others see them it invites them to comment and contribute to the problem that is being described. When you do this you invariably find that you have to render the diagram to an image so that it displays on the web page.

To make life easy for the possible contributors I have found that I have had to simplify the tools that I used to create the diagram, photoshop is a good choice as nearly everyone knows the package, but I guess visio would do just fine.