Software Design Capture Tools

"David T. Ashley" ha scritto nel messaggio news:xcM6h.46081$ snipped-for-privacy@fe167.usenetserver.com...

Take a look at DIA,

Pentel 0.7, and Stencil Set ;>

Seriously though, you could waste enormous amounts of time trying to produce perfect diagrams with some of these tools and miss the essential aspects of what it is you are supposed to be analysing and resolving into some structured semblance of a solution.

If you are going to ask if I really do still use pencil and paper then I am happy to answer in the affirmative. If I need to draw any diagrams neatly then I have found that there are plenty of very capable drawing packages out there which will do just the drawing aspect extremely well. They won't provide the logical links automatically though.

I know you are going to get a whole host of people with UML based tools which may do you very well so long as your pockets are deep enough. You could possibly look at Rhapsody or Statemate from I-Logix (you will see what I mean about needing very deep pockets).

There are free tools around but I wouldn't vouch for their useability or quality though as I don't use any of them (I have only seen an extensive demo of the I-Logix stuff). See for one of the free ones.

I use a whiteboard, some coloured markers and a digital camera most of the time, and Enterprise Architect if there's no alternative ;)

pete

If you want to flowcharts/state diagrams, then I think Visual Thought might work for you -

HTH.

Enterprise Architect is cheap, cheerful and OK for most use. I've used ArgoUML before and didn't like it.

Rhapsody and Rose are too damn heavyweight, too bureaucratic, too clunky.

I was very, very impressed by Telelogic's System Architect. It's far more interactive then Rhapsody and gives you a much more organic feel for how an architecture is evolving. But it's pricy.

pete