Application Design Tools

[Daklu]

Since we're all professional programmers and do things strictly by the book, such as designing the application before coding , I'm curious what tools you use during the design process. On my current project I started with Excel but switched to Visio when it became apparent the application complexity (~100 VIs) wasn't easily captured in Excel. By using the shape data fields I can get Visio to sort of work, but it's difficult to model nested structures, variant attributes, and a few other things.

What I have now is a flowchart layout with blocks for each event case and each processing loop state. I'd like to be able to easily see notes associated with each block, such as what data it generates or changes. I'd also like to easily see notes describing the data types I'm passing between blocks, including variant attributes, type of variant, nested structures, etc.

[As I typed up this post I realized writing an architecture.vi would work much better than Visio. I don't think it's quite what I'm looking for but it's definitely a step up.]

[PaulL]

I use UML and I like it, but I haven't done enough "production" design yet to say how useful I will find it long term. I have found it quite helpful for working out state pattern designs, conveying an understanding of system architecture, and modeling interactions, to give a few examples.