Architecture diagrams enable better conversations

Re:Architecture diagrams enable better conversations by gav on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @11:52AM (#37224517)

I believe that one of the big things that diagrams help with is maintaining state while having a conversation. You don't have to keep track of so many things in your head and it works in a similar way to the "tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em" style of presenting--your audience gets to see up front what journey you are taking them on.

There's a great book by Abby Covert about diagrams in general: "Stuck? Diagrams help."[1]

From a learning perspective, having multimodal[2] options, such as a mix of visual (diagrams), reading, and videos/audio can really help with onboarding. Different people learn better with different methods, and different methods work better in different contexts, for example I personally hate sitting at my desk watching a video, but enjoy doing so on my phone while commuting.

[1] https://abbycovert.com/stuck/ [2] https://www.learnupon.com/blog/multimodal-learning/

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Re:Architecture diagrams enable better conversations by stetrain on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @12:47PM (#37225323)

Definitely agreed. I have found diagrams, and tools that let me edit them quickly, to be great "state trackers" in design and planning meetings. You can get consensus, keep track of the decisions that were made, and then have a shared model you can use to coordinate building that plan.

This has value even if the diagram is immediately obsolete and discarded once the project is complete.

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