Simon Brown simonbrowndotje

We have a failure to communicate {#failure-to-communicate}

If you're working in an agile software development team at the moment, take a look around at your environment. Whether it's physical or virtual, there's likely to be a story wall or Kanban board visualising the work yet to be started, in progress and done.

Why? Put simply, visualising your software development process is a fantastic way to introduce transparency because anybody can see, at a glance, a high-level snapshot of the current progress. Couple this with techniques like value stream mapping and you can start to design some complex Kanban boards to reflect that way that your team works. As an industry, we've become pretty adept at visualising our software development process.

However, it seems we've forgotten how to visualise the actual software that we're building. I'm not just referring to post-project documentation, this also includes communication during the software development pr

	{
	"id" : 0,
	"name" : "Model name",
	"description" : "This is a model of my software system.",
	"model" : {
	"people" : [ {
	"id" : "2",
	"name" : "Anonymous User",
	"description" : "An anonymous user on the Internet",
	"tags" : "Person",

	{
	"model" : {
	"people" : [ {
	"id" : "6",
	"name" : "Administration User",
	"description" : "A system administration user.",
	"location" : "External",
	"relationships" : [ {
	"id" : "7",
	"sourceId" : "6",

	package com.structurizr.example.client;

	import com.structurizr.Workspace;
	import com.structurizr.api.StructurizrClient;
	import com.structurizr.model.Location;
	import com.structurizr.model.Model;
	import com.structurizr.model.Person;
	import com.structurizr.model.SoftwareSystem;
	import com.structurizr.view.SystemContextView;
	import com.structurizr.view.ViewSet;

	<?xml version="1.0"?>
	<root>
	<devicevendordef>
	<vendorname>LOGITECH</vendorname>
	<vendorid>0x046d</vendorid>
	</devicevendordef>

	<deviceproductdef>
	<productname>LOGITECH_R800</productname>
	<productid>0xc52d</productid>

	{
	"people" : [ {
	"id" : 4,
	"name" : "Administration User",
	"description" : "A system administration user.",
	"location" : "External",
	"relationships" : [ {
	"sourceId" : 4,
	"destinationId" : 1,
	"description" : "Add people, add tribes and manage tribe membership."

	private static void createComponentViewsForWebApplication(Model model) {
	SoftwareSystem techTribes = model.getSoftwareSystemWithName("techtribes.je");
	Container contentUpdater = techTribes.getContainerWithName("Content Updater");
	Container webApplication = techTribes.getContainerWithName("Web Application");

	// create one component view per Spring controller
	Set<Component> controllers = webApplication.getComponents().stream().filter(c -> c.getTechnology().equals("Spring Controller")).collect(Collectors.toSet());
	for (Component controller : controllers) {
	ComponentView view = model.createComponentView(techTribes, webApplication);
	view.setDescription(controller.getName());

	import random

	def removeRandomLetterFrom(word):
	lengthOfWord = len(word)
	randomNumber = random.randint(0, lengthOfWord-1)
	letterToRemove = word[randomNumber]
	newWord = ""
	for letter in word:
	if letter == letterToRemove:
	newWord += "_"

	{
	"people" : [ {
	"id" : 2,
	"name" : "User",
	"description" : "",
	"location" : "External",
	"relationships" : [ {
	"sourceId" : 2,
	"destinationId" : 1,
	"description" : "Uses"

	package com.structurizr.example;

	import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
	import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature;
	import com.structurizr.componentfinder.ComponentFinder;
	import com.structurizr.componentfinder.SpringComponentFinderStrategy;
	import com.structurizr.model.*;
	import com.structurizr.view.ComponentView;
	import com.structurizr.view.ContainerView;
	import com.structurizr.view.ContextView;