Introducing the Visual Designers—Designer Relationships and Team System Integration

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

Designer Relationships and Team System Integration

Being presented with five new visual designers, each representing a different view of the overall system, you might be wondering how they all fit together. This section describes the important relationships between the designers, in the context of who uses which designer.

Traditional methods of teaching visual modeling often present a set of notations that individually represent one aspect—or view—of the system without describing how those various views are interrelated. You might learn, for example, that a UML statechart shows transitions between states triggered by events; and that a UML sequence diagram shows messages being passed between objects; but without further guidance, how do you deduce that the events in the statechart are related to the messages in the sequence diagram?

In Figure 1-8, we have used a Visio UML Activity Diagram for convenience to show how various roles within your software development organization would typically use the visual designers, including the artifacts that would be produced or consumed at each stage.

We’ve not used a Team System diagram because as yet there is no diagram suited to that purpose. That situation might change with future releases; in the meantime, we see a retained role for Visio in cases such as this.

You can read the diagram shown in Figure 1-8 in one of two ways:

• A process flow diagram (in bold) showing the activities performed by the various roles—that is, who uses which of the visual designers
  

• An object flow diagram (not bold) showing the objects produced and consumed by each activity—that is, the artifacts exchanged between the design tools

The following sections describe each of those perspectives in turn.