Every tried to make your own sushi? We have done it silvester and it was a wonderful party activities. As you can see, the result looks very good and delicious.
During my first weeks with Day I noticed again the importance of effective communication of IT-Systems architecture and behaviour. Day has various complex tools and frameworks and for new employees or project members it often takes some time to understand the structure and behaviour of the systems and how their part fits into the whole thing. This does not mean that Day has bad documentation, but even with direct contact to core developers it is time consuming to understand complex systems and their environment.
Like every complex system software systems are build by joint efforts of many people who need to collaborate with each other. With people joining and leaving projects continuously it is important to describe the systems in a way that others are able to understand them fast and easily and to know how their part fits in. This requires effective methodologies for describing IT-Systems in order to collaborate effectively.
Because visual notations are often easier to read and understand a series of tools have been developed over the years for modeling - and thus communicating - the structure and behaviour of software systems. Examples are UML, BPMN, FMC or YAWL. Often it is possible to use different tools for modeling the same part of a system. You can model the behaviour of a component by using petri nets or UML state charts for example. The challenge is to select the right tool depending on what you want to communicate and who is your audience.
In the next days I will continue this series with some of my experiences and a set of common tips and tricks for modeling that might help you to model and communicate the structure of your software systems efficiently and thus lowering entry barriers for system understanding.