ActDiag

ActDiag draws swimlane activity diagrams. You declare the flow once, then say which lane each activity belongs to, and it places everything.

It is the fastest route to a swimlane diagram that stays tidy when you add a step.

#What it is good at

• Cross-team processes where the handoffs are the point.

• Swimlane diagrams that change often enough that redrawing is annoying.

• Process documentation generated from a script.

#What it draws

#A worked example

A three-lane onboarding process:

The source, which you can paste into a new diagram and edit:

actdiag {
  request -> approve -> provision -> welcome;

  lane manager {
    label = "Hiring manager";
    request [label = "Raise request"];
  }
  lane hr {
    label = "People team";
    approve [label = "Approve and contract"];
    welcome [label = "Welcome session"];
  }
  lane it {
    label = "IT";
    provision [label = "Provision accounts"];
  }
}

#A few things that catch people out

• Declare the flow first, then the lanes. Doing it the other way round produces odd layouts.

• An activity belongs to exactly one lane; put it in two and the last one wins.

• For BPMN semantics rather than lanes, use the BPMN editor.

#Related

Thirty-one languages. Nobody knows them all.