How to document procedural programming?

Question

In college, I learned how to use UML to document OO applications. In the real world, I was tasked with documenting the old process program, substantially re-creating the missing specification specification documents.

Are there any “standard” documents or methods like UML for documenting procedural code? I am sure there must be something that people used before UML.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes. Flowchart.

Answer 2

You can use PSD (process structure diagrams) or NSD ( Nassi Schneiderman diagrams ). I had to learn it for my first programming lessons before diving into OO and Java. It does not cover various aspects, such as UML, but the starting point for visualizing a procedural program.

Answer 3

Remember that UML stands for Unified Modeling Language. This is not only for modeling relationships of objects, which, in my opinion, are a common misconception of UML. It can also be used for state diagrams, business processes, database diagrams, ... See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language .

I recently used IBM Rational Software Architect to convert state diagrams to Perl. But for Perl, we had to write our own translation files, since Architect did not include them for Perl.

But if you are talking about C code, Architect has a built-in function to reverse engineer the written code into a UML diagram. I used this function for Java and it works very well and creates a diagram of objects. I have not used it for C before, so I don’t know if it will turn it into a sequence, activity or state diagram.

You can download a trial version of Software Architect and see if it works for your code.