On Collaboration in Software: Annotation vs. Flow-Based Diagrams

Abstract

Programming may involve a fair amount of complexity. Accordingly, development of a description is needed to facilitate understanding and to serve more than documentation and initial planning requirements of a program. This paper focuses on the programming level at the point where stakeholders (e.g., designers, algorithm specialists) have concerns about the implementation method (coding) to be used, a concern that stems from the collective accountability of the software project team. The paper claims that current methodologies of producing high-level description to represent structural units and control streams in software programs fall short of providing a foundation for an easily understandable, high-level overview of what the code actually does. The paper contributes to the solution of such a problem by proposing an alternative approach to diagramming of programs. Without loss of generality, the focus on a very recent tool that generates flowcharts from annotated C++ source code to a set of interconnected high-level UML (Unified Modeling Language) activity diagrams. For comparison purposes, the diagrams produced by the methodologies are put side by side for the same source programs. The proposed diagrammatic representation seems to offer a viable alternative in the examined context to activity diagrams.