Designing state machine automatically

Question

In these days I'm designing a pretty complex sofware, which can be designed decently only with a well-thought state machine. My problem is that, beyond a certain level of complexity, drawing the state machine on a piece of paper becomes a mess!

Is there a software which allows to do the layout automatically? I'm searching for something having the following features:

• Language agnostic;
• Based on some state definition language;
• Somehow similar to Graphviz Dot (from the layout point of view), but supporting the state machines semantics, and not just generic graphs;
• Possibly free as in speech, not as in beer;
• Possibly allowing a vectorial output of the resulting diagram.

Thanks for your help :)

Answer 1

Though not usually thought of as a state machine representation, Jackson Structured Programming diagrams can be used as such. I prefer them to state transition diagrams, when the application has a lot of data manipulation involved. They can show the overall picture, and provide substantial space for data operations affixed to the leaves of the diagrams.

I have found the following two tools in my searches:

Jackson Work Bench This is produced from the originators of the Jackson method. I am familiar with their older tools. These older tools supported syntatically all the constructs of state machines - loops; options; and sequences of states. They provide an internal language which is a state machine language They also supported the JSD concept of backtracking both from selections and from iterations. The older tools did not support some of the refinements of state machines - loops that complete at least once; prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; and nested state machines. I have no information whether these refinements are available in the current tools. This tool is likely to be costly, though again I have no costs to hand.

Make a Jackson Diagram. I have no information on this tool. It appears to be a diagrammer only and only Mac based. It is not clear whether it supports any aspect of the semantics of state diagrams, but it is free.