Procedural Design documentation strategies

Question

After reading the definition of procedural design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_document) and searching for a few example diagrams, I have been having trouble on finding out more on what procedural design means other than finding this diagram (http://www.kelso.scotborders.sch.uk/departments/computing/resources/mindmaps/Procedural%20program%20design.gif). Typically, when is this type of documentation necessary? Is it when there's a specific algorithm used in the application?

Answer 1

This is most often used when you have a few very similar constructs that are used really often. In a way SQL is a "procedural design" since it limits you to tables and column and a handful of operations which can be applied to the "data model" (= the database).

Code generators thrive in this area since they have a large but simple input and generate a lot of code that would be extremely tedious and error prone to write by hand. In a similar way, you can generate "documentation" for this which is usually a big waste of time since it will be enormous in volume and contain very little information about how the system works.

[EDIT] In computer science the amount of information in a message is the amount of "surprise" you get per bit. So one page of "1'000 feet view" which is tight packed with information, which gives you a compressed introduction how the system is designed and how you can find your way around, is worth more than 1'000 pages of documentation generated from a data model.