The best way to make sure your diagrams map to code, is to generate your diagrams and the code from a common piece of text. At a job not too long ago, we used

The best way to make sure your diagrams map to code, is to generate your diagrams and the code from a common piece of text. At a job not too long ago, we used a modified form of DOT to describe a protocol state machine. This generated dot, .h's, and some template .c files. This made it such that each state machine for the protocol had a diagram that would map out all the states. Logging and other subsystems output were generated as well so you could go from a log of a test run back to a diagram of what had run. Code generation (or compilers for compilers) are entirely underrated outside of Lisp, and they're not too difficult to create. EDIT: And note that your linked presentation is AWESOME, but I think he misses the description / guidebook being up to date is best accomplished by having it be what needs to be updated to create the software.