Best Practices for Keeping Architecture Documentation Up to Date
summary
Advocates a practical docs-as-code pipeline: store AsciiDoc sources in Git, generate HTML/PDF with Asciidoctor and run generation in CI so docs version alongside releases. Recommends diagrams-as-code for reproducible diagrams—use PlantUML, Mermaid or Kroki—and fall back to diagrams.net using the vector-in-PNG trick to keep editable images. Shows how to embed diagrams and ADRs in the repo, add IntelliJ plugins, and enforce architecture checks via automated tests and CI.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Architecture docs challenges
- 3:13Traditional docs problems
- 5:25Doc-as-code fundamentals
- 6:48Markup languages for docs
- 9:35Modular docs with arc42
- 11:45Requirements vs solution docs
- 13:53Markdown vs AsciiDoc
- 15:41Basic AsciiDoc process
- 17:05Handling diagrams and images
- 18:29Four architectural views
- 22:24C4 model explained
- 24:35Diagram tools overview
- 26:46Diagrams as code
- 28:14diagrams.net for graphics
- 31:10PlantUML for diagrams
- 33:50Structurizr for C4 DSL
- 36:20Docs in IDE workflows
- 40:08DocToolchain pipelines
- 42:16Continuous docs review
- 42:58Executable docs with examples
- 44:02Summary
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