Chapter 20: Diagramming Software Systems

Overview

Common sense dictates that the time you spend to plan your software projects before implementation is paid back down the road in a system that is easier to maintain. Microsoft Office Visio 2003 becomes an important tool in your development kit when you use it to visualize architectures, interfaces, data structures, and more before you write a line of code. Whether you create formal object models, diagram data flows, or prototype user interfaces, Visio includes the templates and shapes you need, representing a variety of methodologies and notations. In addition, with the advanced Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools, you can model the entire software development life cycle and even reverse engineer source code to quickly diagram classes and properties.

This chapter describes the types of software diagrams you can create and focuses primarily on the UML Model Diagram template.

Note

The templates and shapes described in this chapter are included only with Visio Professional.