Flowcharting Methodologies

[Tracey Showalter <tshowalt -at- SCTCORP -dot- COM>]

Flowcharting Methodologies
What kind of flowcharting methodologies are in use out there? Do you use
flowcharts in your technical documentation? If so, what methodology do you use
and is it an industry standard or one of your own devising? What industry
standard methodologies are you aware of? My own background in this subject is
thin, to say the least.

We market a 4GL RDBMS administrative software products written in ORACLE. The
products also have reports/processes written in C and COBOL and are delivered
with several SQL*Plus scripts.

Our company is looking for a widely used methodology to represent our systems
in our technical reference manuals. We currently use a variant of the ANSI
standard (using the IBM template)

We are now considering Yourdon. Neither this nor ANSI is entirely acceptable to
both our technical and our documentation staffs

Some of the pros/cons of both systems are:
*  Yourdon allows a fluid representation of our system's
   processing, whereas the ANSI standard imposes "system stasis",
   as it were.
*  Yourdon is intended to be an analytical system-development
   tool, not a methodology to represent an existing system.
*  Our current use of the ANSI standard is too "redundant", since
   the shape of its objects represent an activity, the descriptors
   in the object specify the activity, and the narratives that
   accompany the flow fully describe the activity.
*  Redundancy is necessary; it is ANSI's level of "redundancy"
   that insures that meaning is conveyed.

Send responses to me or the list; if there's enough interest, I'll post a
compilation.

Thanks everyone.

Tracey Showalter
tshowalt -at- sctcorp -dot- com