Diagramly for Jira

Transform your Jira cards into visual diagrams instantly using AI, helping teams better understand and communicate complex information without any extra documentation effort.

Comment

Inspiration

We observed that visualizing content can dramatically improve communication efficiency, especially in IT teams. While many existing tools require manual input and AI adaptation, we recognized that teams already have valuable content in their story cards. This led us to create a solution that leverages existing content rather than requiring teams to recreate it.

What it does

Our application is a plug-in that automatically visualizes content from story cards using AI-powered diagram generation. With just one click, teams can convert their existing documentation into clear, visual diagrams.

How we built it

We developed the application using Application Forge, which provides robust integration with the institutional platform. The backend infrastructure includes:

  • A custom diagram-as-code library for rendering visualizations
  • A backend storage system for caching generated diagrams
  • A sophisticated data querying system to extract information from various sources

Challenges we ran into

Authentication posed our primary challenge. Since our backend operates on a cookie-based authentication system, we needed to develop a specialized authentication mechanism to enable secure communication between the Forge backend and our service. This required careful consideration of security protocols while maintaining seamless functionality.

Another major technical challenge we faced was perfecting the AI prompt engineering process to consistently generate meaningful diagrams from story cards that often contain mixed information, from technical details to business requirements. Through extensive experimentation and hundreds of test cases, we refined our prompts to better understand context and relationships while maintaining a balance between being too specific and too broad. The iterative fine-tuning process required continuous user feedback to achieve the right balance of accuracy and clarity, ensuring our generated diagrams remained visually consistent and useful regardless of input complexity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're particularly proud of achieving two key elements:

  1. The exceptional quality and aesthetic appeal of our generated diagrams
  2. The simplicity of the diagram generation process, making it accessible to all team members

What we learned

Our development journey provided valuable insights into:

  • Querying data effectively from Forge
  • Implementing efficient data loading and storage mechanisms
  • Integrating third-party services with our backend
  • Establishing robust platform communication protocols

What's next for Diagramly for Jira

Our future roadmap includes several exciting enhancements:

  1. Performance Optimization

    • Implementing streaming caching
    • Introducing parallel processing to reduce diagram generation time from seconds to near-instant

  2. New Features

    • Introducing a "diagram-first" pattern allowing Business Analysts and architects to start with diagrams and automatically generate corresponding story cards and epics
    • Developing a companion plugin for Confluence with expanded capabilities

  3. Platform Expansion

    • Creating a more sophisticated Confluence integration that leverages the platform's unique features
    • Expanding functionality to support additional use cases and workflows

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history