this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
25 points (96.3% liked)

Experienced Devs

3954 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe
jmk1ng
drewsiferr
25
Does anyone use C4 model for visualizing software architecture (self.experienced_devs)
submitted 1 year ago by canpolat to c/experienced_devs
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

We are considering using C4 for our architecture diagrams. Many diagramming tools (including Structurizr which was developed specifically for it) support C4. I wonder if there are others that use it and I would like to hear your experiences.

My initial assessment is as follows:

Pros

  • Diagram as code is a great way to keep things open to change.
  • It allows for better versioning
  • It enforces semantics into the diagrams. Instead of just thinking in terms of boxes and arrows, one need to dig deeper

Cons

  • It has a relative steep learning curve (one needs to study the DSL even though the end result is just boxes and arrows)
  • The tooling is not perfect. One needs to run a docker container to be able to navigate within the diagram (solution: there is also a SaaS offering)
  • Its view of architecture is somewhat limiting. It doesn't seem to be catered for augmenting the diagrams with other forms of diagrams (flowcharts, etc.) or text.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] canpolat 2 points 1 year ago

With Structurizr, you get a site where you can click around to see different levels of the system and different views of of containers, components, etc. Is that also possible with the PlantUML library? Or do you only use it to document one part of the system independent of others? I kind of like the possibility to have the whole system in a single place so that if I change the name of component, it's updated everywhere, but I don't like that it's its own thing separate from the wiki et al.