Pre-Design Brainstorming Tools

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brandon Potter
  • Start date Start date
B

Brandon Potter

Can anyone recommend some applications to help diagramming the initial
beginnings of a software project (i.e. Pre-UML)... Defining initial
application layers, drilling down, defining what components make up that
layer, drilling down to another level, etc.

I keep running out of space in Visio and end up with a pretty weird looking
diagram when I add a big piece and have to start moving stuff around, and
OneNote, although a great program, lacks a good interface for "structured
brainstorming"...

Brandon
 
best thing I've found:

two smart team-mates (and myself, makes three)
in a room with a large white board, at least six colors of markers, and lots
of diet coke.

I'm not kidding.

No tool comes close.

--- Nick
 
One of those printing white boards is required, unless someone is assigned
to record everything diligently. Also I find that Pepsi Max is better.

Finally, if you really want a decent piece of software to record everything,
I recommend the Holocentric Modeller @ http://www.holocentric.com/. Does
everything, and then some.
 
Radek Cerny said:
Also I find that Pepsi Max is better.
Click to expand...

LOL

In this season of politics, I could, just for fun, start a discussion about
the best soft drink for design... but I won't...

--- Nick
 
Hello Radek,

I read through your document quickly, which isn't fair. A paper of this
quality requires careful reading, and I intend to return to it to spend more
time absorbing your message.

What I would say is this: Genie sounds like a good cross between Model
Driven Architecture (the application is driven from the model) and Aspect
Oriented Programming (connections are defined external to the system
components). Both topics are being avidly discussed in conferences such as
SD and OOPSLA these days.

I would encourage you to spend some time studying both MDA and AOP,
especially where frameworks other than yours attempt to reach some of the
same goals with some of the same protocols. I think there may be some ideas
you can lift that will improve your system, to the point where it will be
something akin to a killer app (and who wouldn't want to be the person to
invent the next killer app?).

I would also encourage you to look at some of the descriptions of Service
Oriented Architecture. While you lightly skim the surface of SOA in your
design, you can really improve the model by doing more to manage data in an
SOA manner. Look up the articles and white papers of Pat Helland. I have a
few SOA papers out myself, and there are many others. Support for SOA in
your framework is external (requiring the modeler to define it over and
over) rather than inherent. That would be the best opportunity to improve
Genie.

All in all, I have to say that I am impressed. From what I can tell, Genie
is an intelligent and thoughtful system design that can be reused in an
effective manner for a significant slice of applications common to business.

Thanks for sharing,
--- Nick
 
Wow!

Thanks for that; more than I expected. Time to do some homework.

Regards,

Radek
 
Back
Top