This UML sequence diagram template can help you: - Save time by starting with this basic framework. Access Lucidchart's UML Sequence shape library so you can quickly create your own. Show how objects and components interact to complete a process. Open this template and add content to customize this UML sequence diagram to your use case. Sequence diagram is the most common kind of interaction diagram, which the following nodes and edges are typically drawn in a uml sequence diagram: You draw the deletion message as an arrow, with the title (this is optional). To build a sequence diagram, use a uml sequence template or starter diagram, which includes the uml sequence stencil. What is a UML sequence diagram? 4. Sequence diagram: an 'interaction diagram' that models a single scenario executing in a system. 2nd most used UML diagram (behind class diagram). Shows what messages are sent and when. Relating UML diagrams to other design artifacts:. CRC cards → class diagrams. Use cases → sequence.
- Lucidchart Sankey Diagram
- Lucidchart Uml Sequence Diagram Example
- Uml Sequence Diagram
- Lucidchart Uml Sequence Diagram Template
The job of a solution architect is to clearly communicate the design of software systems to business, project managers and developers. As we found out earlier, you can not just draw a single image. This is nor possible, neither useful for anybody. So instead you cover different concerns, grouped by view points and create a set of diagrams describing each view. Of course, there is a billion of ways you can do it. How to pick one up?
During my work as Solution Architect I use 5 diagrams the most: C4 Context and Container diagrams, Deployment Diagram, Sequence diagram and Use Case diagram. Let's go through them.
Context
The c4 website does a pretty good job explaining their diagrams, but I still would like to provide my own understanding.
Your system operates in some context. Primarily, it's their users and other software systems. Users may have different roles like content creator, reader, administrator. Also they can be internal or external. Other software systems may be source of data for your system, or get the information from it. It is important to understand this context to properly design the system and remind yourself to integrate with external systems.
Example
This diagram displays the neo-banking digital platform presented by a blue rectangle in the center.
How to draw
- Identify the persons who will use your system
- Identify the external systems
- Create a single rectangle depicting your system
- Add connections between the system, users and external systems
- Provide meaningful comments on every component
Tools
There are different tools you can use to create the context diagram. There are C4 stencils for OmniGraffle, C4 examples for LucidChart, draw.io has the stencils as well. You can also use PlantUML to leverage diagrams as code. Let's say we want to draw the aforementioned diagram for a neo-banking digital platform with uml:
We define a person, a system, external systems and the relations between them. Person, System and System_ext predicates have 3 parameters: a key, a title and a description. Rel predicate has 3 parameters as well, but they are different: a key of one entity, a key of another and a name of the relation.
Basically you can draw a context diagram in any drawing tool you'd like. Several great examples can be found here.
Important highlights
- Context diagram is the first thing you create when working on a system. Failing to do so may cost you missed integrations and mistakes during system design.
- Context may actually include some lower level details, this is perfectly fine.
I was struggling with a context diagram for one banking system. It would include only a newly created system and a single customer, which didn't bring any value. After the reconcideration I added an API Gateway and an existing Auth Provider we were going to use. That way the context diagram started to make sense and allowed to omit those elements from the lower level diagrams.
- Aleksey, Solution Architect.
We had a learning system in development. At the time of Alpha release we understood, that analytical system is not receiving the data from the client facing app. Should we have a context diagram in place, we won't make that mistake. Luckily, it was easy to fix.
- John, Solution Architect.
Summary.
Context diagram is a crucial view which provides the highest level understanding on the people and systems your future system will interact with.
Containers
Containers don't mean docker containers here. Container is an any deployable entity or data storage from the C4 perspective. It can be a mobile application, a website, a VM, a docker container, a database or an object storage; whatever you can deploy. In my experience this diagram is the most complex and it gains the most attention in the same time. That mean it is almost the main diagram you have to work on!
The trick here is you are zooming in into your system. What was a single rectangle, now consists of some rectangles and arrows. Those rectangles are containers now.
Example
How to draw
- Identify the list of entities: microservices, storages, external services
- Place them on the diagram
- Add comments on the purpose of each component and the technology it is implemented with
- Add connections with arrows
- Add meaningful labels to each arrow
- Pick up a color scheme and apply it
- Create a legend.
Tools
Where to find ip address of computer. Same as for the context diagram: Draw.io, OmniGraffle, LucidChart and others.
Important highlights
- Pay attention that the elements are placed in columns. First column is just an API Gateway, the second - the first group of services, then a second group of services, then some storages. This way you demonstrate the layered architecture, which helps to understand the boundaries and responsibilities.
- When microservices count grows beyong a single digit, your connection lines will start to intercept. The academical books say you have to avoid the interceptions for readability. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Do not get upset: focus on making the diagram readable. You can use different colors or line widths, or different line styles(dotted, solid, etc.)
- If you use a custom tool(like I am) you need to include a Legend block. It's not obvious what the arrows mean, and what is the color's meaning. Legend explains it.
- The common question when using cloud is: do you include the managed services, like queues and messaging solutions? I tend to answer no. This complicates the diagram instead of making it easier to read. If some services are communicating through a message queue, display it via separate type of arrow.
I teach my fellow architects to follow the layered approach when they create container or components-and-connections diagrams. Those diagrams tend to include many entities and structuring them with layers increases readability.
- Ilya, Enterprise Architect.
Summary
Container diagram provides insight into which deployable items your backend consist of and how those components talk to each other.
Sequence Diagram
The first two diagrams show how the elements of the system relate to each other. However, they can not demonstrate what happens in your system. For example, a user sign ups for your system. Which components are involved? What actions are triggered? How the components interact with each other? Sequence diagram can answer these questions.
Example.
At the top we see interacting entities: persons, web and mobile applications, external systems, services and data stores. Each entity has a vertical line underneath. The interaction between services is notated with horizontal arrows between the vertical lines. Those arrows can be of different types depending on whether this is a synchrornous operation or an asynchronous. The grey rectangles shows that process is taking some time and the length should indicate the duration: the longer the rectangle, the longer the time.
Lucidchart Sankey Diagram
How to draw
- Choose a business case(a user sign-in, a purchase, etc.)
- Identify the entities involved in the use case
- Put them on the diagram
- Add interactions(arrows)
- Provide valuable comments to each arrow
Tools
Unfortunately, OmniGraffle is not suitable for sequence diagrams. Therefore I use draw.io and LucidChart for drawing them. The latter is a good choice because you can choose either to draw the diagram manually or use the UML Sequence diagramming. This is possible as Sequence Diagram is a structured one.
Important highlights
- Sequence diagram is an absolute must when designing a new feature you add to the system. It shows the affected parts of the system, points of integrations with external software and contracts which the team will have to create or update.
- Sequence diagram is valuable for QA engineers as well. It provides the insights where the potential issues can be located and serve as a source of truth for Test Cases.
Few months in a project, and we still faced the issues when the parts of the system were not ready for a long awaited feature. Stakeholders were not happy at all, and there was a traction between different teams. We discussed the issue and agreed to make architecture design before the imlementation. Sequence diagrams were a great help: now we know the full picture before writing the code, not after.
Vladimir, Solution Architect
Summary
Sequence diagrams allow to document the behavior of the system in different business cases.
Deployment Diagram
Using context, containers and sequence diagrams you can answer what parts of the system consist of and how they relate and interact with each others. But they hardly can answer the questions of availability, scalability and security. Deployment diagram helps with that.
There are several different things you want to display.
We had a learning system in development. At the time of Alpha release we understood, that analytical system is not receiving the data from the client facing app. Should we have a context diagram in place, we won't make that mistake. Luckily, it was easy to fix.
- John, Solution Architect.
Summary.
Context diagram is a crucial view which provides the highest level understanding on the people and systems your future system will interact with.
Containers
Containers don't mean docker containers here. Container is an any deployable entity or data storage from the C4 perspective. It can be a mobile application, a website, a VM, a docker container, a database or an object storage; whatever you can deploy. In my experience this diagram is the most complex and it gains the most attention in the same time. That mean it is almost the main diagram you have to work on!
The trick here is you are zooming in into your system. What was a single rectangle, now consists of some rectangles and arrows. Those rectangles are containers now.
Example
How to draw
- Identify the list of entities: microservices, storages, external services
- Place them on the diagram
- Add comments on the purpose of each component and the technology it is implemented with
- Add connections with arrows
- Add meaningful labels to each arrow
- Pick up a color scheme and apply it
- Create a legend.
Tools
Where to find ip address of computer. Same as for the context diagram: Draw.io, OmniGraffle, LucidChart and others.
Important highlights
- Pay attention that the elements are placed in columns. First column is just an API Gateway, the second - the first group of services, then a second group of services, then some storages. This way you demonstrate the layered architecture, which helps to understand the boundaries and responsibilities.
- When microservices count grows beyong a single digit, your connection lines will start to intercept. The academical books say you have to avoid the interceptions for readability. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Do not get upset: focus on making the diagram readable. You can use different colors or line widths, or different line styles(dotted, solid, etc.)
- If you use a custom tool(like I am) you need to include a Legend block. It's not obvious what the arrows mean, and what is the color's meaning. Legend explains it.
- The common question when using cloud is: do you include the managed services, like queues and messaging solutions? I tend to answer no. This complicates the diagram instead of making it easier to read. If some services are communicating through a message queue, display it via separate type of arrow.
I teach my fellow architects to follow the layered approach when they create container or components-and-connections diagrams. Those diagrams tend to include many entities and structuring them with layers increases readability.
- Ilya, Enterprise Architect.
Summary
Container diagram provides insight into which deployable items your backend consist of and how those components talk to each other.
Sequence Diagram
The first two diagrams show how the elements of the system relate to each other. However, they can not demonstrate what happens in your system. For example, a user sign ups for your system. Which components are involved? What actions are triggered? How the components interact with each other? Sequence diagram can answer these questions.
Example.
At the top we see interacting entities: persons, web and mobile applications, external systems, services and data stores. Each entity has a vertical line underneath. The interaction between services is notated with horizontal arrows between the vertical lines. Those arrows can be of different types depending on whether this is a synchrornous operation or an asynchronous. The grey rectangles shows that process is taking some time and the length should indicate the duration: the longer the rectangle, the longer the time.
Lucidchart Sankey Diagram
How to draw
- Choose a business case(a user sign-in, a purchase, etc.)
- Identify the entities involved in the use case
- Put them on the diagram
- Add interactions(arrows)
- Provide valuable comments to each arrow
Tools
Unfortunately, OmniGraffle is not suitable for sequence diagrams. Therefore I use draw.io and LucidChart for drawing them. The latter is a good choice because you can choose either to draw the diagram manually or use the UML Sequence diagramming. This is possible as Sequence Diagram is a structured one.
Important highlights
- Sequence diagram is an absolute must when designing a new feature you add to the system. It shows the affected parts of the system, points of integrations with external software and contracts which the team will have to create or update.
- Sequence diagram is valuable for QA engineers as well. It provides the insights where the potential issues can be located and serve as a source of truth for Test Cases.
Few months in a project, and we still faced the issues when the parts of the system were not ready for a long awaited feature. Stakeholders were not happy at all, and there was a traction between different teams. We discussed the issue and agreed to make architecture design before the imlementation. Sequence diagrams were a great help: now we know the full picture before writing the code, not after.
Vladimir, Solution Architect
Summary
Sequence diagrams allow to document the behavior of the system in different business cases.
Deployment Diagram
Using context, containers and sequence diagrams you can answer what parts of the system consist of and how they relate and interact with each others. But they hardly can answer the questions of availability, scalability and security. Deployment diagram helps with that.
There are several different things you want to display.
Compute resources. This can include virtual machines, docker containers, kubernetes clusters and cloud functions. You can also think of mobile devices and desktop computers as compute resources as well.
Storages. Persistent storages for your data like relational and nosql databases, binary file storages like images, music and video, bigdata storages with parket files and so on.
Messaging resources. Kafka/RabbitMQ installations, Google Cloud pub/sub, AWS SQS and others.
Networks. Your computers use networks to communicate with each others. Both physical and virtual networks should be displayed.
Availability Zones. You can think of them as data centers.
Infrastructure Nodes. DNS servers, Load Balancers, Firewalls, CDNs
The diagram shows the compute, storage and messaging resources alongside with networks and availability zones. It also includes the instrastructure nodes which are not fulfilling any functional requirements, but addressing non-functional instead.
How to draw
- Place the major building blocks: browsers, mobile devices, public cloud, data centers
- Place the computing and storage resources
- Add infrastructure nodes
- Add networks
- Add the network calls between nodes
- Add the monitoring resources
- Add scalability comments if required
Example
C4 notation has a supplementarty deployment diagram:
Mind the names of the compute resources, their types and node numbers.
Another example for AWS cloud:
Tools
There are plenty of tools to create a deployment diagram. OmniGraffle, LucidChart, Draw.io and others are perfectly capable of doing so with proper stensils installed.
Important Highlights
- Every system has the requirements on security, performance, availability and other -ilities. Deployment diagram helps to address those requirements.
- In most cases deployment diagram is the only one depicting the network aspects of your solution.
- Deployment diagram should show how the requests are going through the system in a clear, understandable way.
Summary
Deployment diagram complements the understanding of the system from the physical appearence perspective.
Use Case Diagram
The most of previous diagrams were very technical ones. Use Case diagram is more business oriented. It depicts how the persons are interacting with your system in a very high level way. Use cases themselves can be treated as business capabilities, which I were describing in this article.
How to draw
- Draw a rectange. This will be our System boundary
- Define which persons your system is dealing with
- Add use cases inside the system using ovals
- Add connections between the actors and use cases
Example
Tools
Lucidchart Uml Sequence Diagram Example
The architect can draw a diagram with any graphical editor and with the same toolset used for other diagrams. Omnigraffle, LucidChart, Draw.io are working well. Remember, that Use Case Diagram is a structured once so you can use UML for creating it. PlantUml or LucidChart helps with that.
Summary
- Use context diagram to show the highest level view on the system
- Document the use cases with the corresponding diagram
- Zoom on the system internals with containers and deployment diagrams
- Document particular business cases with sequence diagrams
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Lucidchart's UML Sequence Markup allows users to rapidly create the sequence diagram they need using a simple markup language
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Join For FreeHere at Lucid Software, we are all about simplifying processes. Our goal is to discover new ways to make your life easier, which is why we're excited to introduce our UML Sequence Markup feature—aka your one stop for beautiful sequence diagrams created faster with less hassle.
Gone are the days of dragging and dropping each shape to piece together a diagram. This premium tool allows you to generate a UML sequence diagram simply by typing your markup directly into Lucidchart:
- Create a new Lucidchart document.
- Click 'More Shapes'.
- Open the UML shapes library.
- Select the 'Use Markup' button in the UML Sequence category.
- Enter your markup in the pop-up dialog that appears. As soon as you click 'OK,' the magic happens, generating a sequence diagram that follows industry standards for UML markup.
Uml Sequence Diagram
It's intuitive, it's easy, and it's fast. You're able to spend less time trying to create your diagram and more time actually using it.
'When I use Lucidchart, I'm trying to get a job done as quickly as possible. Our new UML sequence markup tool gets me to a great diagram faster, and I'm thrilled to share this time-saving feature with our users. It frees up resources to improve efficiency overall,' said Ben Dilts, our co-founder and chief technology officer here at Lucid Software.
While other tools may perform a similar function, Lucidchart stands out in more ways than one—we've managed to narrow it down to our top three.
Lucidchart Uml Sequence Diagram Template
- Lucidchart allows you to re-edit the markup to update a diagram that is on the page. Your diagrams are living documents allowing you to continually refine your creations. Simply click the 'Use Markup' button again to add to or edit your markup. When you do so, the spacing is automatically adjusted for a clean and professional feel.
- Once your sequence diagram is created, it can be customized with just a few clicks. With complete access to all Lucidchart's easy-to-use formatting capabilities, you can make your diagram fit your every specification. Pick your theme. Style your lines. Choose your text.
- Lucidchart lets you pick and choose your diagramming style. If you're designing a larger UML sequence diagram that will require constant updating, use markup. If you're building a simple diagram, feel free to drag and drop shapes from our complete UML library. Or make it a combo deal—get your diagram started with markup and then edit by dragging and dropping. It's diagramming done your way to fit your needs.
'Lucidchart's UML Sequence Markup allows users to rapidly create the sequence diagram they need using a simple markup language,' said Brian Pugh, vice president of engineering at Lucid Software. 'Then they can take advantage of the full power of Lucidchart's editing tools to customize the diagram as needed. In short, it allows users to efficiently create visually stunning diagrams.'
Figure 7: Sequence Diagram Figure 8: System Architecture Figure 9: XML File Figure 10: OnCreate Method Figure 11: Asynchronous HTTP Handler. The second phase is the design and the implementation of the mobile application. During these phases, the technology to be used will be selected and a database will be created and filled. Mobile app ( Sequence Diagram (UML)) Use Creately's easy online diagram editor to edit this diagram, collaborate with others and export results to multiple image formats. Edit this Diagram. We were unable to load the diagram. Tap diagram to zoom and pan. You can edit this template and create your own diagram. A UML Use Case Diagram showing Mobile application. You can edit this UML Use Case Diagram using Creately diagramming tool and include in your report/presentation/website. Sequence diagram for mobile application. Mobile App State Diagram-You can edit this template and create your own diagram.Creately diagrams can be exported and added to Word, PPT (powerpoint), Excel, Visio or any other document. Use PDF export for high quality prints and SVG export for large sharp images or embed your diagrams anywhere with the Creately viewer.
Chances are you're not the only one who'll be using this diagram, and one of the keys to effective diagramming is collaboration. Once you've got your diagram just the way you want it, share it with your colleagues. You'll be able to choose whether they can view, edit, comment or share the document. Use Lucidchart's chat feature to collaborate in real time or even start a Google Hangout—all from within your document. Don't worry about compatibility, as the UML Sequence Markup tool works on every major Internet browser and Internet-enabled device.
Don't just take our word for it. Check out this comment from one of our users, 'I LOVE the new UML Sequence Markup feature! The ability to create/edit diagrams using simple markup is one of the most important features for me. I'd love to see more markup-based diagrams!'
Learn more about our UML Sequence Markup editor and explore Lucidchart's UML tool.
