I've seen too many *bad* process diagrams or [[System Modeling General Process|systems models]] that abuse swimlanes. A swim lane is used to assign a process (or step, function, capability, etc) To a resource (role, application, etc). The problem is they make it very difficult to maintain a coherent flow for any diagram with multiple interactions crossing lots of resources. While it is sometimes possible to create a good and useful Diagram using swim lanes, It really depends on if the diagram is meant to be interpreted by humans or computer computers, And/or if the process can be illustrated in a somewhat linear fashion while hearing to the swim lanes. Also note that swim lanes Imply that the responsibility for making the determination on a condition falls within whatever swim lane the conditional block happens to be placed. **** # More - [[Diagram Semantic Mechanisms]] ## Source - [[Myself]]