Sequence Diagrams Tailored for Software Design used to Build a Carpooling Management System

The problem of making novice software developers productive in a short period of time is important. We present a compact rule set to be used when writing sequence diagrams at the design phase of a software system development. By using sequence diagrams constructed with these rules, we intend to make programmers completely understand the software design and concentrate in the task of implementation of the modules, avoiding the need to make them think on design issues and also assuring that their implementation will comply with the requirements. Using as an example the development of a web application, we show how the rules that we propose here should be applied in sequence diagrams. Finally, we show evidence of the successful implementation of the software system by novice programmers and discuss the advantages that the proposed rule set.