3 posts tagged with "uml"

The use case diagram is the scope picture: actors on the outside, what the system does for them on the inside, and — the reason product and engineering fight — the line between them. In Confluence that picture usually comes from a diagramming tool export that goes stale the moment scope moves.

Mermaid 12 added the syntax to render UML use case diagrams from text — usecase-beta — and Enhanced Markdown for Confluence renders it in the same macro as everything else on the page. This guide gives you the syntax and two copy-paste diagrams.

Sequence diagrams die in Confluence in one of two ways: someone draws one in a diagramming tool, exports a PNG, pastes it into a page — and three sprints later the flow has changed but the image has not. Or someone writes the flow as prose ("the client calls the order service, and if payment is approved…"), which is accurate but impossible to read under time pressure.

ZenUML splits the difference: the diagram is code, so it edits like code and renders like a diagram — branches, error paths, and parallel work included. This guide shows the syntax with copy-paste examples you can drop into Confluence today.

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 for Confluence, you can write class diagrams in plain text and render them instantly, no external drawing tool required.