Understanding Diagrams as Code From Idea to Implementation

Staying on top of documentation can feel like an uphill battle.  

Any experienced knowledge worker knows outdated diagrams and incomplete records create confusion, slow progress, and lead to costly errors. Yet, with so many priorities competing for your time, finding the bandwidth to update and maintain clear, accurate documentation is a challenge. 

What if there was a way to streamline this process, reducing the effort required while delivering better results? 

That’s where the idea of diagrams as code comes in. Diagramming using a code framework is efficient, scalable, and eliminates the headaches of manually redesigning diagrams whenever a project evolves. 

This blog will explore how diagrams as code can address the common pain points of managing technical documentation. We’ll look at its key benefits, including faster updates, improved collaboration, and greater accuracy, and show how adopting this method can empower your team to work smarter, not harder. 

What is Diagrams as Code?

“Diagrams as code” is an approach to diagramming where you represent the way a diagram should look as a code artifact.  

Rather than creating the representation of your ideas using visual components like lines and shapes, you define the way the diagram should look in text form, similar to the way you would write code that represents a web page.  

For a deep dive into how this concept helps busy teams tackle technical documentation, our webinar explores the benefits of and implementation methods for diagrams as code, as well as how Gliffy is investing in this investing in this strategy to better serve technical teams.  

However, if you don’t have time to watch the full thirty-minute webinar, you can keep reading for an overview of the highlights. 

Key Benefits of Diagrams as Code

Diagrams as Code Is Faster and Easier

Adept coders might prefer to write diagrams as code because it’s faster for them to communicate their ideas that way than by drawing with shapes and lines.  

Being able to visually convey information is a powerful skill that may not come naturally to all technical professionals, but there is still great value in visuals for communicating the high-level design of a thing. 

Diagrams as code fills that gap by providing a way to visually convey information using a language that’s more intuitive to the knowledge workers on your team. 

Diagrams as Code Allows You to Focus on Content

The idea of diagrams as code is born of the same ethos as most other “___ as code” movements, such as infrastructure as code, where you take a concept that is not usually depicted as code and turn it into code.  

This has the natural effect of allowing the diagram creator to focus on the actual information and letting a tool handle the responsibility of making that information look the way it should look, with proper spacing, alignment, and so on. 

Being able to focus solely on the content of your diagram and letting a different tool take your input to create the actual picture for you means you don’t need to worry about colors, line weight, text sizes, and all the other visual aspects of a diagram. 

In turn, this allows you to generate the content you need to create the visual without distractions.  

Diagrams as Code Helps You Align Your Workflows

Treating diagrams as code artifacts helps you integrate them more efficiently with existing processes and tools. 

For example, if you wrote a simple representation of an entity-relationship diagram using a diagrams as code framework such as Mermaid, you can quickly edit the text, search and replace, and make other changes much faster than you could with an image file or a diagram you created using a traditional GUI (graphic user interface) tool. 

The ability to find and update information quickly makes it easier to align your diagrams with version control, code review processes, and other workflows. 

Diagrams as code also contributes to a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. If you build diagrams in a way that is easy for people to read and collaborate or comment on as part of their existing workflows, they’re more likely to take that opportunity. 

Diagrams as Code Creates a Consistent Language Across Teams

Choosing a specific framework for your diagrams as code efforts makes it easier for individuals across teams to understand the structure and purpose of a diagram.  

It also makes it easier for them to reproduce it and view it as an image. This leads to more effective collaboration, especially among cross-functional teams. 

Popular Frameworks for Diagrams as Code

The concept of diagrams as code has been adopted by several different tools and methodologies that attempt to make diagramming faster and easier for technical teams.  

These are a few of the most common frameworks for diagrams as code and the traits that define each one.  

Graphviz

Graphviz is one of the older frameworks for diagrams as code, and one could argue that it’s the most battle-tested due to that wealth of experience. Graphviz is primarily used for flowcharts and weighted diagrams with lots of configurability. 

PlantUML

PlantUML is more focused on the domain of user stories and UML modeling, so the layouts it generates are closely aligned to those types of diagrams. 

Mermaid

Mermaid is slightly newer than the other diagrams as code frameworks, but it has taken off in adoption since its introduction.  

Mermaid attempts to split the difference between Graphviz and PlantUML, taking what it feels are the most popular subsets of functionality from the other tools and streamlining them. This allows users to write the least amount of code to get the widest variety of potential results. 

Mermaid functionality is built directly into Gliffy, allowing the user to create diagrams as code directly in Confluence. This means Gliffy doubles as a traditional GUI tool and a means to visualize diagrams as code, so every member of your team, both technical and non-technical, can diagram in the way that works best for them.  

Create a Mermaid Diagram with Gliffy

Diagrams as Code Comparison Chart

How to Implement Diagrams as Code

Pick a Standard Notation and Align on Tools 

Choose a framework for diagrams as code that integrates with your team’s regular tools and workflows and aligns with your team’s strengths.  

While you can keep your diagrams as code files in a directory somewhere, they won’t do much good for your team if they’re relatively inaccessible. 

If people need to search for them or if it requires several steps to turn that code into an actual image, you’re just re-implementing the friction you were trying to remove in the first place by adopting a diagrams as code framework.  

Since the whole purpose of this practice is to collaborate and share information more freely to accelerate productivity, choose a tool that is harmonious with the way your team already works. 

Start Small

You don’t have to go from no diagrams to a full library overnight. Add just a little bit of diagramming to an artifact that didn’t have anything before.  

Starting somewhere, even if that only means a few simple lines of code, is better than having nothing, and it’s a foundation for an entirely new practice.  

Once you get started, you can begin to expand your diagramming practices, create templates, and encourage users to reuse common elements. 

Set Clear Expectations

In some cases, like this one, it can actually be helpful to create documentation on how to create documentation.  

It may sound redundant, but all this means is that it’s important to give clear instructions and guidelines on when or where you would expect diagrams as code to be used.  

Setting clear expectations and answering questions is the best way to establish consistency for any process and enable better collaboration. 

The Future of Diagrams as Code

We’re currently in the infancy of a broader movement where entering text into an AI tool to create the output of an image is becoming more prevalent and accessible. As models continue to evolve and improve, this practice will only continue to grow. 

While diagrams as code is a specific implementation of this idea, we are seeing the growing presence of many AI tools where anyone can input a description to receive an image that fits that description (with varying degrees of accuracy, of course). 

It’s likely that we will see tools like these continue to develop, and more advanced tools developed to generate images, including diagrams, from plain text. 

Create Diagrams From Code in Confluence

If your team works in the Atlassian ecosystem, installing Gliffy Diagrams for Confluence is a fast and simple way to begin implementing diagrams as code. 

With Gliffy’s built-in Mermaid editor, you can create UML diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and more alongside your team’s documentation without dragging and dropping a single shape. 

Try Gliffy Free