Marketing Ninja

Software professionals often use diagramming to help explicate their ideas to other technical and non-technical people involved in a project; they’re also often used by the developers themselves to help them inexpensively model their applications on paper before they sit down and spend considerable time developing the actual application.

I’m going to walk through a typical project life cycle and briefly go into some of the diagram types that you can use to help illustrate your ideas and ultimately, increase productivity in your projects. I’m sure there are several different diagramming standards that I don’t cover on this article, but I can’t sufficiently cover them all (sorry!)

Brainstorming Phase

All projects begin with a bit of brainstorming.

Mind Mapping – Illustrate Your Ideas

All projects begin with an idea, and sometimes you just want to sit down and transcribe your ideas to paper. Mind Mapping diagrams are a simple method of doing that.

You simply begin with a central idea and then branch it out into topics and sub-topics. Mind Mapping software makes it really easy to take a vague idea and organically expand it to a full-bodied concept; in other words, it helps you make the transition from “idea” to “potential project.”

Check out this video for a more full-length exploration into mind mapping. Also, check out Web Worker Daily’s reviews of three web-based mind mapping tools that you can use to get started.

End-Product Conceptualization

Now that you’ve used mind maps to flesh out your idea into a potential project, it’s time to move from an idea to a conceptualization of a functional end-product produced by the project.

UML Use Case Diagrams – Illustrate How Your End-Product May Be Used

You shouldn’t begin planning a project and allocating resources for a project until you have a clear idea of how your end-users will actually consume or utilize your product. UML use case diagrams help you systematically determine all of the possible ways your product can be consumed by your end-users.

Of course use case diagrams don’t magically reveal how your product will be used by themselves; they simply help you incrementally iterate through all of the different ways your product can be consumed by different actors, or external entities, typically human, who interact with the product.

There are a lot of good reasons to use UML use cases in software engineering, but I also think that diagramming use cases is essential to determining if your project creates enough potential value to be worth your development time.

UML Class Diagrams – Break Down Your End-Product Into Logically Independent Modules

It’s essential to break your end-product down into logically independent components. The first reason is that you need to be able to organize individual team member efforts around isolated portions of the project; simply stated, you can’t have two people writing the same line of code at the same time.

The second reason is that you need to prioritize the components and determine what features or modules need to be developed first. Class diagrams not only help you break a product down to a collection of separate units called classes, but they help you understand the functional dependencies between classes.

Lastly, by breaking your product down into smaller sub-units, it’s easier to plan and schedule different deliverables during the course of production and development.

Project Planning & Organization

Org Charts – Organize Your Human Resources

If you’re planning a project for a large organization or corporation, chances are that you already have a neatly organized hierarchy.

However, if you have to organize a team from a group of unaffiliated potential team members, an organizational chart is a great way to illustrate the delegation management and to help team members know whom to report to.

Org charts are pretty straight forward; if you want to learn how to build them in 10 minutes, About.com has a simple tutorial on the subject, which I have linked to.

Gantt Charts – Plan Your Project’s Milestones and Schedule Deliverables

Gantt Charts are a commonly used tool for scheduling group tasks, setting milestones, and dates for when deliverables are due. Gantt charts are simply meant to act as a tool for monitoring project progress and determining what tasks are behind schedule and a means of determining what tasks have the highest priority at any given time.

I recommend using them for large projects that consist of a high number of deliverables. Gantt charts make it simple to determine what needs to be worked on in any given day.

There’s more to diagramming than what I’ve shown here

While I’ve delved into Unified Modeling Language somewhat, I’ve stayed away from a lot of the tools that are used for software-development specifically. The diagram types I have showcased here on AjaxNinja, however, are perfect for assisting in planning projects of any kind. Enjoy.

Photo Credits
All of the diagrams featured in this article were created with SmartDraw; most of them are default examples included with SmartDraw Suite, but the one at the top of the article is my own creation.

 

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