I do flow charts "by hand" using Visio. It is nearly the best I have found.

Now to talk about automatic flow chart generators. The results of these are totally worthless in my opinion. Trying to follow the code flow from these will be a painful process. And anyway,,,,if the plan to do flow charts is to arrive at some very decent documentation for your program then doing it "by hand", the same way the code was made, is the only reasonable approach.


The last thing I can say, having worked on a multitude of medical devices software, where full flow chart documentation is required by FDA development process guidelines, there is a great benefit of making flow charts "by hand". Making flow charts for your own code is like doing an extremely detailed design review of everything you have done. There are a number of other benefits as well which I have realized while making flow charts...

1) I am able to check all the subroutine headers to make sure they are correct and complete.

2) I can see all the comments and ensusre that they are correct.

3) And I have found many an extraneous bug in my code, (especially with assembly language), where I tested conditions but didn't use the result, or where I was pushing things that didn't need pushing, or where the actual code had a bad design or flow and it could be made simpler.

Making flow charts these days, using the "by hand" method is a whole lot easier than it used to be years ago. I have a large high resolution 22 inch monitor. With 1600x1200 resolution it is possible to have two windows open side by side, code on the left in CodeWrite and flow chart on the right in Visio. 8-)
Michael Karas