Requirements and Diagrams - Warfighter Made - Part 4

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As we continue with the Warfighter Made requirements gathering and in addition to the mock up tool selected we needed to have a tool able to facilitate some drawing and diagramming of the platform. If you do a quick search on the Atlassian Marketplace you will find multiple options, I decided to go with Gliffy as I used them during the development of the open source environment for EHR (www.vxvista.org).

Empowering Confluence pages with diagrams

It is well known that an image has more value than thousands words and I noticed that since I started creating content in Confluence. Moreover when interaction is added into the diagrams created opening the possibility of connecting multiple pages with more details.

A simple Gliffy Diagram helped me to represent the overall architecture of the new platform that is basically based on three pillars: Help Center, Project Tracking and Collaboration environment.

Gliffy diagraming tool helped us to easily show the taxonomy of the new platform to be developed for Warfighter Made. The screen capture is from an active session using Gliffy.

Once finished and saved, the graphic is embed as content into the Confluence page and it looks like any other image. The file is attached to the page and it is ready for editing or to be saved as pdf with the rest of the page content.

Diagrams and Jira Workflows

In addition of representing the environment taxonomy we used Gliffy to show a simplified version of the Jira Workflow. The diagram helped us to explain to the Warfighter Made the workflow steps that go along with their requirements.

Jira Workflow overview for Warfighter Made CEO

Jira Workflow with transitions

Overall Architecture and use of icons on Diagrams

In addition to the traditional diagrams shapes Gliffy allows the use of icons to better represent the players on the information flow.

Information flow on the whole environment. Overall architecture

Images, Words or both?

I personally prefer both, images and words combined and interacting together. As a matter of fact, having a high level diagrams, with hyperlinks to details pages will allow the user to dive dipper when needed and at the same time to have the big picture. Gliffy installed in Confluence added a good amount of value during the requirements gathering phase. It is a solid and reliable add on and I am glad that they are also participating on the non profit license sponsored by Atlassian. It really makes the difference with this project for Warfighter Made.

More about this project

The goal is to share on this series of blog-posts how we are building the new collaboration platform for Warfighter Made. See below the list of completed and planned blog posts.

• Part 1: Unleashing the power of Collaboration to overcome the Sadness of 22
• Part 2: Onboarding the team to Inspire – Adapt – Overcome
• Part 3: Gathering requirements and using Mock Ups
• Part 4: Requirements and Diagrams
• Part 5: Radiation of information in Confluence and Jira
• Part 6: Empowering the user experience by customizing the Confluence theme
• Part 7: A new theme for Jira Service Desk Portal
• Part 8: User management and qualification from workflow
• Part 9: Hosting an Atlassian Server environment
• Part 10: A 60" Kanban board in a Mechanic Shop assisting veterans
• Part 11: Managing content visibility by user groups