Live Architechture Diagrams

The agile manifesto says “working software over documentation“. This definitely doesn’t mean “no documentation” and an accurate upto date architechture diagram provides lots of benefits.

Even the creation gets lots of people up to speed, changes to it become noticable (not just someone hacking a new service in without telling anyone) and they are great during design decisions.

The issue is that if it isn’t easily recallable, is hidden away in a content management system or out of date as it’s slow to edit then the benefit is lost.

I’ve seen this done well before with it drawn on a wall that had paint which could be drawn on. All those pain points above are therefore resolved. It was just left up and quickly edited as necessary so always up to date.

It became a great resource for any architechture type discussion that occurred within dev and promoted better design discussions

Hope this helps