flowchart: best practices

Question

Could some one point to articles / books on how to create good flow chart diagrams?

Answer 1

Tutorial here.

Also get a copy of Microsoft Visio.

Answer 2

BoUML-it's free!

I've used this open source tool for the last 6 months at work to create UML diagrams: bouml.free.fr/

I've used it on both a Macbook running OS X, as well as Ubuntu Linux on a desktop, both with success. It also does codegen (although I haven't used this feature myself). If you create a diagram from within BoUML, you can right click ->Tools->HTML etc,etc., and it and actually generate the diagram -- this will create a whole tree of html, css, etc., and include a .png file which you can later choose to import into a Word-like document.

If you're new to UML, and would like to explore that route, I suggest UML Distilled by Martin Fowler as a way to quickly ramp up. I still use this as a reference when I'm putting diagrams together and I forget some syntactical detail ;) The nice thing about UML is that most programmers will understand it. If you don't want to buy a book you can, of course, Google 'UML tutorial' and get a slew of free info.

Non-UML:

You can also use open office's draw application to do some simple flow charting. It has some nice non-uml shapes, so if you're not trying to be 'strict' in the sense of conforming to UML, and just want a simple flow chart, that may be a good choice.