Planning in Flash

Flash "industry" is plagued by poor programmers. Main causes:
1. Real programmers don't know what Flash is offering now (especially concerning ActionScript3).
2. Current "flashers" are mostly graphic designers forced to learn some AS in order to enhance their sites, presentations and eventually make simple games.

There are lots of awful practices like including code into the graphics file (.fla) and such only because Flash allows it. Flash was meant from the beginning to be easy on non programmers and thus permissive. Worse than Visual Basic.


One good practice used everywhere else but not so much in Flash is planning the application's technical architecture. What are the advantages of this?

1. You have a clear idea of what the app should do and how does it do it.
2. It's easier to scale and modify.
3. It generates all the code, leaving you to write only the code inside methods
4. Makes it easier for new programmers to join the team at a later point in development.
5. Easier to trace and debug.

Although at first it seems overkill, you'll soon see that it's a must for apps larger than 20 classes.

I personally prefer Visio for my diagrams (C# data models), but you can use any tool according to your style and needs. See a list here.

Check this for the things you need to have in your UML tool.