3 posts tagged with "class-diagram"

Your team grows by two people. The new hires open the wiki and find the architecture doc: a screenshot of a whiteboard, dated 14 months ago, where PaymentService does everything except the thing the diagram says OrderService does. Day-1 onboarding just taught two people the wrong architecture.

Quick answer: keep the architecture in Confluence as a Mermaid class diagram, rendered by Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence and diffs like code. Classes, methods, interfaces, ownership — in editable text that updates when the code does. This post gives you three copy-paste examples: the onboarding service map, interface+implementation modules, and a request-flow sketch.

The bug report says "orders show twice in the report" and the fix takes three days because nobody on the team is sure whether order_lines links to orders on order_id or source_order_id, and both columns exist. The schema is documented — in a schema.md that lists columns as bullets and a diagram that was last exported when the DB was two migrations younger. The join question is exactly the thing an ER diagram answers at a glance, and the thing a bulleted column list cannot answer at all.

Quick answer: document the database schema in Confluence as a Mermaid erDiagram, rendered by Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence. Entities hold keys and attributes; relationship lines carry the cardinality and the join's noun. When the discussion turns to the domain model the code exposes, add a classDiagram on the same page. This post gives you three copy-paste examples.

Class diagrams are the standard way to model object-oriented systems. They show the classes in your codebase, their attributes and methods, and the relationships between them -- inheritance hierarchies, composition, aggregation, and simple associations. Whether you are documenting a domain model, onboarding new engineers onto a codebase, or collaborating on a design before writing a single line of code, a UML class diagram communicates structure faster than paragraphs of prose.

If your team uses Confluence for technical documentation, embedding class diagrams directly on your pages keeps your design docs next to your architecture decisions, runbooks, and sprint planning notes. With Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, you can write class diagrams in plain text and render them instantly, no external drawing tool required.