Reflections on Session 12

I can tell that there are a number of programmers in our class judging on the high quality of their data flow diagrams that were submitted. A handful of students really struggled with this assignment because many had sequential flowchart approach ingrained in their minds. My guess is that many had taken a procedural programming class before and learned the need to build a flowchart to show the sequential operations including decision points and stepwise operations.

When I think flowchart, I think of this classic one:



Well, a dataflow diagram is quite different. Some say it is more object-oriented. It shows the information flows among processes, entities (internal and external), and data stores.

This modeling is important for one to understand the processes involved -- including the underlying subprocesses. Without this knowledge, the developer cannot do his/her job in developing a system that would support those real-world processes.