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Discussion on: Would you trade your project documentation for updated software architecture diagrams?

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Harry Wood

I definitely agree that an architectural diagram can be more valuable than pages and pages of textual documentation, particularly for giving that at-a-glance overview. "A picture is worth a thousand words"

I'm a bit sceptical about automatically generated diagrams, or rather I know that they're great as far as they go but... I guess I'm thinking of complex systems with separate components in different code repos, and different layers of across a tech stack. To get a good overview diagram of something like that, you kinda have to draw it yourself. Why? Because it would be difficult/impossible for a diagram generator to infer information across all those things, and also because a diagram of a complex system requires some manual decisions and perhaps even a little artistic flair, in choosing what details to leave out!

But of course a manually drawn diagram is something which then needs to be maintained.