See jgraph/drawio-libs for a list of available libraries (kudos to Ganesh and Frauke for sharing this). Users can create libraries of re-usable shapes.Store diagrams as editable PNG or SVG to use them in your documentation workflow without conversions.IDE plugins, for example Visual Studio code and (soon) IntelliJ.WYSIWYG editor with lots of templates and example symbols.Editor that works in the browser and as a stand-alone application on Windows/MacOS/Linux/Chrome OS.Reviewing the topics covered in the previous section, it scores a lot of points: The main focus of the meetup was, previously known as draw.io. Stand-alone tools like OmniGraffle, Signavio, TogetherJ, Camunda Modeller and Structurizr were also well-received. Several fans of Excalidraw where in the meeting, also fans of ConceptBoard and Camunda’s Cawemo. Draw.io/ were popular as well, as well as plug-ins to Confluence like Lucidcharts and gliffy. Lots of participants liked coder-friendly tools like PlantUml or ditaa. Sparx Enterprise Architect received mixed results. One participant used in the past, but not anymore. Tools like Rational Rose weren’t popular either. The tools that they didn’t want to use again were the office formats: Microsoft Powerpoint and Visio were mentioned multiple times. The second warm-up question asked what tools participants like and would use again, or tried and wish they hadn’t. They tend to be outdated and out-of-sync too quickly. Why? Frauke found the right words for it: Never for “replacing stuff that could and should be checked in the code directly”. I observed that I don’t use diagrams for class diagrams. scribblings of any kind to make sense of existing code.infrastructure (pipelines, deployment workflows and metrics), and.business processes and workflows (with flow charts or BPMN),.UML types for architectures (deployment, state, component, class, sequence diagrams sometimes C4-style),.The list of when the group used diagrams was long: The first warm-up question was when to use diagrams and when not. Users need to learn about idiosyncrasies that steepen the learning curve to get the results they want (or need). Tools like PlantUML auto-layout all elements all the time, but it’s a love-and-hate relationship: complex diagrams can make graphviz crash, and it might be impossible to get the layout “right”, especially when addressing people on the C-level. The resulting diagram should be “good enough”. Fiddling with sizes of boxes, alignment and layout is time-consuming: We want to focus on the problem and its solution. The things that slow us down are inflexible data formats like Microsoft PowerPoint that are difficult to integrate: We don’t want conversions that are computation intensive or make our workflows slow and brittle. With we can store a ready-to-view diagram in source control that is editable at the same time. ![]() ![]() Tools like Excalidraw allow for real-time collaboration, or allow sharing a JSON with other users. Templates and examples help us to get started and to create consistent output. We want co-workers to collaborate in creating a solution and to review our changes. Thoughts about diagrams What makes us productive (or slows us down)Īsking this question about productivity in today’s meetup revealed a coder’s mind: We want diagrams stored in source code management and editable inside the IDE without switching contexts to another tool. What makes us productive (or slows us down).Read on to find out more about the features and surprises and other tools had in store for us at this meeting of the Continuous Documentation Regulars. This article lists several diagramming tools and several ways you can use them to enhance the documentation for your users and to improve your authoring workflow. When authoring technical documents, we often struggle to find the easiest way to include diagrams.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |