I have been looking to expand my methodologies to better involve Unit testing, and i stumbled upon Behavioral Driven Design (Namely Cucumber, and a few others). I am quite intrigued by the concept as i have never been able to properly design top down, only because keeping track of the design gets lost without a decent way to record it.

So on that note, in a mostly language agnostic way, are there any useful tools out there i am (probably) unaware of? Eg, i have often been tempted to try building flow charts for my programs, but i am not sure how much that will help, and it seems a bit confusing to me how i could make a complex enough flow chart to handle the logic of a full program, and all its features.. ie, it just seems like flow charts would be limiting in the design scheme.. or possibly grow to an unmaintainable scale. BDD methods are nice, but with a system that is so tied to structure, tying into the language and unit testing seems like a must (for it to be worth it) and it seems to be hard to find something to work well with both Python and Java (my two main languages).

So anyway.. on that note, any comments are much appreciated. I have searched around on here and it seems like top down design is a well discussed topic, but i haven't seen too much reference to tools themselves, eg, flow chart programs, etc. I am on Linux, if it matters (in the case of programs).