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Imagine the scene. It’s late in the evening on a dark and wet Thursday. You are a Heating Engineer, the best in the business. Suddenly you get a call over your 24 Hour hotline. There’s an emergency at the local Secondary School. In one of the Chemistry labs when they turn on a hot water tap high pressure gas is coming out! You punch in the address into your Sat Nav and off you go.

Screeching to a halt outside the School you meet the caretaker who is on his way home. He gives you a torch and a very large bunch of keys with some mumbled instructions about the problem being in the “Vincent Building” which is “over there – don’t worry you can’t miss it” – oh and by the way there’s a power cut.

Adjusting your tool-belt you stride purposefully in through the front door looking forward to hours blundering around in the dark with only a feeble torch by way of illumination trying to find one particular tap in one particular room in a totally unfamiliar environment.

Sound familiar? Well, it is not too different from the situation when you are pulled in toa project to:

1. Find the “small bug” in the web-app which was written years ago by someone who no longer works for the company.
2. Added to an existing team to help out with a project to “just push it over the line…”
3. Just make a “small tweak” to the large mission critical application – without touching anything else (“because we are a bit short of QA resource…”)

Having encountered this situation many times myself and with the teams I’ve run, I eventually snapped and shouted into the Ether – “There MUST be a better way to do this!”.

Working with the [School of Computing at Greenwich University] we’ve developed the [COMPACT Web Design Notation]. It is an open Source (distributed under the Creative Commons license), pragmatic (you only need to use what’s useful to you) way of drawing a high-level overview of a web application using a notation that everyone can follow (no you don't need to understand UML to use this!).

Once you have your “map” you can much more easily find your way around your application AND guide others where they need to go.

And all this only needs [8 modelling steps] to complete using its [drawing palette]

For good measure it's been peer reviewed for [publication] by the BCS and in the Journal of Internet Engineering and it's been tried and tested in "real world" use.