Hi all, I'm interested in learning how Diagram as Code tools (such Structurizr, Mermaid, PlantUML etc) can be leveraged to support developer teams. These tools can generate anything from C4 Model, sequence diagrams, graphs etc. Has anyone tried automating the creation of diagrams, for example by analyzing code bases? I would like to know what's possible and useful.

Hi Roger, if I understand what your asking, your looking to for something to analyze code and generate C4 models and diagrams etc. If so, its entirely possible my organization ran into the same problem/request in our open-source IDP and we a third party application along with a custom application to analyze the code the output was a markup file that was stored in the repository. That was picked up by the IDP. The groups using the tool used the CI/CD process to manage variations and changes. It does take a little heavy lifting in the beginning as well as evangelism of the process, but well worth it.

Yes , that's exactly what I was looking to do. The fact is if I look at our development Wiki, diagrams are far between. It seems worthwhile to have an IDP help create them. I was hoping it would be possible to create at least initial versions of diagrams that devs could then take ownership of and modify. If the CI-CD process could auto update then that would be even better. But we're not that far along yet creating our IDP, and I'm trying to get a handle on what's possible without too much custom coding. How would you describe the capability you had? I mean what diagram types did you generate and how useful and complete were they? Did you save the dev teams a lot of work?

"disclaimer - the reference in this post our commercial tool' - a need like this was one of the reasons we created qmcloud.io / Even though this is a bit different (diagrams are a bit abstracted to represent a bunch of actual behind the scenes cloud resource). In our platform, the visualization is exactly how the cloud resources get deployed. We don't yet have an option to BYOCode but its a roadmap item for us to be released in Dec/24 sprint. Have you tried lucidchart ? which just creates a diagram from your target state as opposed o from the code. Not sure if they have a refresh option.