Best Practices for Documenting Actor Framework Programming

[Jordan Kuehn]

I've been working with the Actor Framework for a little while now, and have been watching some of the CLA Summit videos (thanks for those btw!) and I'm wondering what is the best practice for documenting the architecture of a system built with the Actor Framework.  In one of the videos AQ mentions that UML doesn't have a representation for this.  The class hierarchy gives a small glimpse into what is going on, but doesn't describe how the actors are interacting and the messages that are being passed between them.  I gave the Symbio tool a quick glance and it didn't immediately seem to provide the outline I was looking for.  I want to be able to generate a diagram quickly and easily that describes the architecture so I can hand it to someone and say this is how things work.  I can create something by hand that is UMLish but I'm wanting to ask all of you guys to see what your approaches have been.

[lvb]

The UML Sequence Diagram is pretty useful for documenting Actor interaction.  See the example I created at https://decibel.ni.com/content/message/46192#46192 for an example.

 

There is also a LabVIEW implementation of this at https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-28748

[Jordan Kuehn]

Both of those look good to me.  From your response I take it that there is no consensus yet though.  If I were to go and make a one-off diagram, it would likely look something like what you made in your example, but if there is a 'right' way to go about doing this I'd like to conform to a standard.  If one doesn't exist, it should.