In day to day work, checklists and Standard Operating Procedures are much more useful than diagrams.
If there's a yak-shaving exercise, write it down as an SOP. It'll become obvious if the process is flawed or a target for automation.
If making schema changes, document exactly all the steps required to integrate, test and deploy the change. It's complicated and easy to screw up - but a checklist can prevent the silly mistakes tired devs make.
The Checklist Manifesto [0] was written by a surgeon and has been shown to drastically improve surgery success rates. I'd love to see more checklists documenting development procedures - many of these could be shared as best-practice.
In a sense, true. Diagrams can be part of an operating procedure however - why not even write operating procedures for architects? Checklists to ensure they've consulted with developers, product owners and site reliability engineers. Checks to ensure the diagrams are up-to-date and actually useful.
If there's a yak-shaving exercise, write it down as an SOP. It'll become obvious if the process is flawed or a target for automation.
If making schema changes, document exactly all the steps required to integrate, test and deploy the change. It's complicated and easy to screw up - but a checklist can prevent the silly mistakes tired devs make.
The Checklist Manifesto [0] was written by a surgeon and has been shown to drastically improve surgery success rates. I'd love to see more checklists documenting development procedures - many of these could be shared as best-practice.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2010/01/05/122226184/atul-gawandes-check...