ABSTRACT
For those of us in the software industry, the phrase engineering drawings connotes plans, elevations, and sectional views. The connotation is true only to some extent. When there is a solid item, be it a part, a subassembly, or an assembly, it needs plans, elevations, end views, and sectional views. But drawings are used for a variety of other purposes, such as electrical wiring diagrams, electronic circuit diagrams, piping diagrams for air and water flow, process flow diagrams, PCB layouts, real estate layouts, and so on, which are all line diagrams without elevations, end views, sections, or orthogonal views. For the higher-ups in the software field, manufacturing is just mass or flow process manufacturing and drawings mean plans, elevations, and end views. They have not heard of batch and job-order manufacturing and the line diagrams listed above. They also have not heard of BOMs that are associated with every drawing. This chapter is an attempt to show that engineering drawings can be profitably used for capturing software designs in a much better manner than the existing methodologies. It is for a good reason that drawings are called the language of engineers and have been adopted by engineers of all fields except the software engineering field. This chapter discusses all these aspects and gives a sample set of drawings in Appendix E to help readers understand this concept and apply it practically.
