En route to Victory Road

Button-bashing is fun and all, but in reality, game strategy is where it’s at. Whether you’re leading your team to victory in League of Legends, outmaneuvering opponents in Fortnite, or up against a particularly nasty raid boss in World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy, your success inevitably depends on the preparation and game plan you have put together beforehand.

Developing a winning strategy takes forethought, cunning, and careful planning. From obtaining that key loot you’ve wanted for so long, to climbing the precious League Elo ladder, it’s important to visualize the steps you will take on the path to victory, and what better way to visualize this than with draw.io!

In this blogpost, let draw.io be your trusty steed, speedrunning you to the Winners Circle. We’ll show how you can take your gaming strategy to the next level, and make your future gameplay better coordinated, more collaborative, and more efficient.

1. Hone your game plan with swimlane diagrams

Unlike Leeroy Jenkins, you probably don’t want to run into battle headfirst, with no plan on how to execute your strategy, or who will be responsible for what.

Swimlane diagrams are a great way to visualize complex strategies in a simple and organized manner. They’re ideal for mapping out rotations that involve multiple players or stages with different responsibilities. They enable you to plan ahead, and ensure everyone on your team is aligned and knows their role in the upcoming fight.

Use swimlanes to represent different players or roles in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, and symbols to depict the actions and interactions between them.

A swimlane diagram for planning a WoW boss fight

2. Develop your game sense with Fatality flowcharts

Game sense is not as simple as “practice makes perfect”. While this will help your reaction time and increase the speed with which you make decisions, analyzing your previous games and comparing them with how others compete will take your gameplay to the next level. The deeper you develop your understanding of a game’s mechanics, along with your objectives, strategies, and interactions, the more you will increase your game sense.

draw.io empowers gamers to craft diagrams depicting potential flank routes, chokepoints, and optimal ultimate ability combinations. You can use visualizations to dissect replays, and highlight crucial instances where game sense played a pivotal role, from predicting enemy pathing to anticipating an opponent’s strategy.

A flowchart is ideal for illustrating the decision-making process and the sequence of actions. Use different shapes and colors to highlight certain actions, like movement or abilities. Connectors will guide those viewing the diagram through the steps that will signify the flow of gameplay. Things like decision splits, branches, and conditional actions can also be depicted in your flowchart.

A flowchart depicting the Overwatch fatality gameplay loop

3. Collaborate with your teammates on your strategy map

In games like WoW, FF Online, ESO, etc., teamwork is absolutely essential, and collaboration is everything. The more in-tune you and your teammates are, the better your chances of a coordinated effort resulting in success. That’s what gaming headsets were developed for in the first place, right? (Not to badmouth everyone because you’re sore your group wiped).

Create a strategy map in draw.io that you can quickly share with your raiding guild, for everyone to add their ideas to. You and your team are able to collaborate on your strategy in real time: simply jump on Discord, share your diagram with your group, and get visualizing! Everyone has the chance to capture their ideas, suggestions and comments, and see and interact with what their teammates are adding. This truly synergizing experience with your team means no one is left behind on your journey to success.

A multipage diagram here is perfect for this: on one page, you have your strategy map, on the next, you have your schedule and roster for your guild, all stored within one central diagram.

Page 1 of a multipage diagram depicting a strategy map: player vs. player battleground

Page 2 of a multipage diagram depicting the team roster

4. Use Foresight to create mind maps for community engagement

You might have recently begun your content creator journey and are starting to stream your games on Twitch. Or you might be a seasoned coach, providing tips to gamers on an international playing field to help them get good. In either case, fostering community engagement is often a pain point for gamers. You try and reach viewers, but your channel just isn’t growing.

Fear not! With draw.io, you can create stunning mind maps to provide your followers with valuable insights into your gaming tips and tricks. By actively and regularly sharing loadouts, strategies, game sense, spawns, etc. with your audience, you give them exclusive access and privileged insight that will allow them to learn from you, and from each other.

Not only will you inspire your viewers to use and share these resources themselves, you will ultimately cultivate community engagement and create an enriching gaming experience for everyone.

A mind map to come up with ways to boost community engagement

A Paradigm Shift in your game strategy

The four diagrams above are just a glimpse into the versatility of visualization that is possible with draw.io. From refining tournament strategies to fostering community engagement, draw.io offers a suite of tools and features to elevate your gameplay, along with a shift in your way of imagining, planning and executing your strategy.

Embark on your journey to glory, with draw.io by your side!

Want to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on social media and learn how others use draw.io, as well as pick up some helpful tips and tricks.

Get your head in the game

Team Playbooks are a great way to orchestrate workshops, and get colleagues on board and involved in discussions. Their purpose is to provide a framework for teams to work on specific areas, such as holding retrospectives, and dependency mapping.

With Atlassian’s Roles and Responsibilities Playbook, at the click of a button you have a Confluence Template loaded and ready for your team workshop on defining roles and responsibilities.

In this blogpost, we’ll show you how adding draw.io diagrams to your Playbooks will take them to the next level, and provide the platform for an efficient meeting that keeps a full track record of what’s been discussed and decided as a team.

draw.io and Team Playbooks: a perfect match

When you add diagrams to your Playbook Confluence Template, you provide your team with everything they need to participate in a workshop that is visual and productive. Here’s how:

• Everything is stored in your single source of truth: your draw.io diagram, along with the documentation from your roles and responsibilities workshop, is all stored centrally within the Confluence, available for anyone to access and edit at any time.

• Empowering real-time collaboration: you and your team are able to work on the diagram simultaneously. This is particularly useful for Playbook workshops with remote and hybrid teams working across the globe.

• Revision history keeps a record of all changes: consult the revision history in your draw.io diagram to see all previous versions of that diagram. Here you are able to see what’s changed and when, for example, if you want to locate information that went missing during the collaboration process. Plus, the good news is that if you revert the diagram to a previous version in draw.io, the Confluence Template and page history it is stored within will remain unaffected.

How to add a RACI Chart to your Template

The example below shows a RACI Chart that has been created at the top of the Roles and Responsibilities Confluence Template. This RACI Chart was the outcome of a roles and responsibilities workshop, and all the information that was used to inform the Chart is available below in the Confluence page.

To add a RACI Chart to the Roles and Responsibilities Template:

1. In your Confluence space, click on Templates, locate the Roles and Responsibilities Play, and then click Use template.

2. The Confluence Template looks like this:

3. Gather your team and follow the Instructions for running this Play.

4. When you want to add a draw.io whiteboard to the page, in the Confluence edit mode, start typing “/draw.io” and select draw.io Board.

5. To create a table, head to the plus (+) icon in the left sidebar, hover over Table, and choose the number of columns and rows you wish to have.

6. Invite your team to collaborate on the diagram, in real time or asynchronously.

Teammates collaborating on the RACI Chart in real time

7. The example below shows the finalized RACI Chart, built from the outcome of the team workshop.

The completed RACI Chart, embedded in the Confluence page

Recording the highlights

The Roles and Responsibilities Confluence page now serves as a full record for your team: capturing the workshop discussion, and the resulting RACI Chart that will be used to further define the individual roles within the team.

Tip: If you want to save this diagram as a template to use time and time again in future meetings, see our related blogpost, Add draw.io diagrams into Confluence page templates.

By seamlessly integrating draw.io diagrams into your Confluence Playbook Templates, you empower real-time collaboration and ensure that all team members are on the same page at every step of the way. With draw.io’s revision history, you can track changes and refer back to previous versions as and when needed. What’s more, everything is securely collaborated on and stored in your single source of truth: Confluence.

So, what are you waiting for? Take your Playbook Templates to the next level with draw.io diagrams!

Kick off your draw.io journey

Want to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on social media and learn how others use draw.io, as well as pick up some helpful tips and tricks.

Ethical decision-making impacts healthcare delivery at every level: from systems-level decisions, to helping patients and families make the right decision for their own care.

draw.io’s diagrams can assist in providing a visual structure for making ethical decisions; keep reading to find out more, and for a free “Ethical Decision Making” template designed to support Clinical Ethics.

What is ethical decision-making?

Ethical (or values-based) decision-making is not just about making the best decision for the most people. Each person is unique, and trying to force a “one-size-fits-all” solution may not respect what is important to an individual, or what their values are. These values can be informed by culture, religion, or personal feelings. Instead, a structured approach that involves relevant parties will result in a better outcome.

One of the biggest challenges of ethical decision-making is ensuring all involved parties feel their voice has been heard. A process that doesn’t include perspectives from relevant stakeholders will not be an ethical one.

Structure is very helpful in guiding these decisions. A repeatable, documented process makes life easier for the medical professionals involved, and also ensures that the process achieves a shared understanding amongst participants of the key question (what is the problem that is trying to be solved), and what is important (the values) to everyone involved.

The “values-based decisions” framework

Several models exist for helping teams resolve challenging ethical questions, but the “Values-Based Decisions” process by Bashir Jiwani, PhD., is utilized in a number of healthcare organizations and has proven to be effective.*

This step-by-step process seeks to first align all parties around the key question or questions needing to be resolved, then seeks to surface and weigh the values that are important to the key people involved, and only then does it turn to brainstorming options.

Once those options are analyzed against the key question, and the previously-shared values, a course of action will be planned. The strength of this process is the focus is put on collaboration, and shared values.

Using draw.io to make ethical decisions

As we’ve shown in the past, draw.io is a very helpful tool for visual brainstorming. By using draw.io inside of a tool like Confluence, we can leverage collaboration to help teams make ethical medical decisions.

We’ve developed a draw.io template that takes Dr. Jiwani’s process and puts it into our helpful diagramming product. The template serves to guide you and your teams through the decision-making process together.

Here’s how your team can make use of it:

1. Click on the Download Template button below. This will save to the XML file to the Downloads folder on your device.

2. In a new Confluence page, start typing “/draw” and select draw.io Board.

3. Drag and drop the downloaded XML file into the board editor.

4. Click Publish in the top right to save the diagram.

You can download the template here:

1. Open Confluence.
2. Open draw.io (blank whiteboard).
3. Drag & drop your XML file into your blank drawing area.
4. Use it as a custom template if you like.

Once you have made any further changes to the Confluence page the diagram template is embedded in, click on Update to save the page.

The template is now ready for you and your teammates to collaborate in Confluence, where you’ll benefit from:

Real-time collaboration

Invite your collaborators to a team meeting, in-person or online, to work on the diagram together. You will be able to discuss the answers for each step, and, depending on how you prefer to work, have one designated teammate record everyone’s ideas in the diagram, or assign a person to a specific section that they are responsible for filling in.

Additionally, collaborators can quickly add questions or raise comments during the collaborative process, either to be addressed in the meeting itself, or asynchronously.

Export your diagram to PDF

Once you’ve completed the process, you can export the diagram as an offline PDF to maintain a static version for your records. Remember that Confluence page permissions apply to draw.io diagrams too, preventing unintended users from accessing any completed diagram on a page.

Wrap-up

We thank Dr. Jiwani for graciously allowing us to share his process with our users. Is this template helpful for your team? Be sure to let us know, so we can pass the information on to him!

Want to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on social media and learn how others use draw.io, as well as pick up some helpful tips and tricks.

Don’t panic!

It’s two weeks before your exam. You’re staring at all the words on a page, but the ideas just aren’t going into the ol’ noggin. The sense of dread starts to creep in. What do you do?

Here are a few options:

A) Descend into a blind panic. You assume you will fail your exam and as a consequence, you believe you will never ever get a job or be successful.

B) Accept defeat. Have a cup of tea or your preferred beverage, and wait for all this to blow over.

C) Make an action plan. Find a solution to represent the info you’re trying to learn in a better way.

Through trial and error, and possibly with a few tears, you might encounter A) and B), but sooner or later you’ll hopefully reach C). The next question is, how are you going to condense this info into bitesize revision chunks, while preserving all the key points you need to learn?

The answer: draw.io!

We’re not blindly prescribing that you use draw.io – after all, draw.io isn’t a cult (at least, we don’t feel it is). Rather, in this blogpost, we want to showcase how draw.io allows you to visualize in a way that beautifully captures the information you’re trying to learn, and helps you reinforce those tricky concepts.

Let’s kick that action plan into gear.

The mouse is mightier than the sword

In a world where online and hybrid learning are the new norm, many students are now faced with lugging around folders filled with lecture notes and worksheets between school and their dorm room. By the end of uni (trust me, I know), you’re left with ring binders full of papers that you tell yourself you might need one day in the future, but ultimately they sit around for a few years collecting dust. You don’t have the heart to shred them, after all, you worked hard writing out and organizing your notes! Plus, that’s years’ worth of (often costly) study being thrown away. But for the most part, they can and they will go into the recycling bin, or the attic.

You can use Confluence to keep all your lecture and revision notes in one place. Save paper, the planet, and your back: when you store everything online in one system, all you need to carry around with you is your laptop (and probably the charger).

You can quickly rearrange the order of files into parent and child pages in Confluence, and archive any pages you no longer use (but you can restore them, if you need them at a later date). This is much easier than trying to retrieve previously-discarded notes on paper that have ended up in the shredder, or in some sort of flaming pit…

Seamlessly store and organize your lecture notes in Confluence

Using diagrams to reinforce concepts

Everyone learns differently. For some, pictures speak louder than words, for others, reading text reinforces ideas.

Diagrams appeal to so many learners because they combine both pictures and words. What’s more, they hone in on the relationships between steps; you “follow the arrows” in a diagram. This is especially important when you’re revising topics: you don’t learn facts in isolation – it’s crucial to understand how everything links together. These relationships form logical transitions between ideas: this can include key points on a topic for example, or steps in a process.

For educators too, diagrams are a powerful tool that are essential for many subjects like software development, engineering, and the sciences. Learning how to read and interpret diagrams, and clarifying the shapes and what they mean, sets students up for success in their study and later their work life.

The trusty mind map is a prime example of this and is a great study resource. Mind maps assist with relationship-based learning by design, organizing information hierarchically and representing relationships among pieces of the whole concept via their structure. All major ideas stem from the original concept at the center of the diagram, and can branch off into smaller and smaller ideas the further away from the center they appear.

In draw.io you can create your mind map from scratch, or you can type in the topics for your mind map into Smart Templates to generate the basic structure, which you can then customize to your liking. The example below shows an AI-generated mind map from the search criteria, “psychology mind map containing clinical, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, forensic, health, neuropsychology, and occupational psychology”:

3. The final diagram after customization: adding branches and colors

Take your diagrams even further in Confluence

You can effortlessly add diagrams into your Confluence pages. You then have a combination of text and images for your revision notes, making concepts much easier to recall than just with text alone. Like with notes stored in Confluence, with draw.io if you ever need to change the order of steps in a diagram, or add or remove steps, this is much easier to do in an online format, over pen and paper.

Lastly, if you want to add links to external resources within your diagrams, you can! The example below shows a big picture overview diagram that contains links to related content elsewhere. These links could be, for example: subprocesses within other diagrams or diagram tabs, internal or external URLs, attachments, Confluence headlines, and so on.

Add custom links to your diagrams

Reflections and projections

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be showcasing more ways draw.io in Confluence and Jira can help you during your studies – so keep an eye on our blog!

Some of the topics already covered, and ones that we will be covering in detail, include:

• Confluence, Jira, and draw.io: the ultimate student toolkit
• The student’s guide to group project greatness, with draw.io
• Let your ideas flow with draw.io: designing a scientific experiment
• Don’t short circuit: use draw.io for your electrical diagrams
• 3 diagrams every computer science student should know
• 2 diagrams every business major should know
• Eat the elephant: breaking down ideas for your final dissertation/ thesis

A quick recap

In the last blog article, our fictional Sketch Team experimented with Smart Templates to generate custom diagrams that visualize key processes within their AI-driven emote project. They brought these diagrams to life by adding color to shapes and lines, as well as changing the font and border styles. This added a touch of personalization to their diagrams, as well as helped guide stakeholders through their team processes.

The team has reached the end of their current Sprint, but how did it all really go? Did they finish their tasks well before the deadline, or was it a last-minute rush? Did everyone on the team feel listened to? No project, big or small, goes without a hitch, and it’s now time for the Sketch Team to take stock and reflect on how the past two weeks went as a whole: what did they feel went well, and what could be improved for next time?

The opportunity to address the questions above will be in the team’s retrospective. The Sketch Team’s nominated Scrum Master will set up and guide the retro, ensuring a fruitful conversation that celebrates the project and team’s successes, while also paving the way for important lessons learned, and the action items they will take forward. Below we will explore two options for running a retro: in Jira, or in Confluence.

Running a retrospective in Jira

To run a retrospective in Jira, the Scrum Master would first need to create their draw.io retro diagram, and save this to their online OneDrive, GoogleDrive, or to their local hard drive. This will form the basis of the Sketch Team’s discussion.

Once the retro template is finalized, the Scrum Master can invite the rest of the Sketch Team to a virtual meeting, share their screen with the draft retro diagram, and add the team’s ideas as the discussion is flowing.

When all the team’s comments have been recorded, the Scrum Master can embed the diagram into the Jira epic for the project, in order to capture the insights from the retro discussion, and to create Jira tasks and subtasks that were agreed upon. For more information on this step, see the section below, Assigning action items in Jira.

Real-time retrospectives in Confluence

An alternative to running the retrospective in Jira is to host it in a Confluence page. The major strength of this is that it allows the team to add their own ideas and collaborate in real time. To set up a retro in Confluence:

1. Create a page in Confluence.

2. In the new page, begin typing /draw and select the draw.io Diagram macro, to start creating the retrospective template. Alternatively, you can download one of the retrospective templates from this related blog article.

3. When your template is ready, use the Share button in the Confluence page to invite your team members to collaborate on the diagram.

Assigning action items in Jira

Once the team has gone through the retro and voted on which action items they will go forward with, this is where Jira comes into play.

The Sketch Team will embed their Sprint retro diagram in the Jira epic for their emote project. The reason is twofold: first, it provides an overview of the discussion and key learnings that the team can refer back to at any point. Second, the action items from the retro can be added as tasks within the epic, to then be assigned and worked on in the next Sprint.

Looking for inspiration for your next retrospective? To get you started, our draw.io for Agile Retrospectives article has some fun coffee and wedding-themed templates for you to download and use with your teams.

Join us next week for our final article following the Sketch Team, where we’ll look at how their engineers support the requests from users of their newly-released emote feature. For all the blogposts in this series, see:

• “Epically” kickstart your project: using draw.io in Jira
• Visualize your project structure in Jira, the Smart way
• Speeding tickets: optimize support in Jira Service Management using flowcharts

Join us today as our resident D&D expert, Jan Schmidt, showcase how dungeon masters and all who would like to take up the mantle can utilize draw.io to enhance their creative capabilities. Upgrade your skills to a legendary +3 through the power of visualization, and use that action surge to dash ahead!

Dungeons and Dragons has been with me since childhood. Before I could even read, I was already watching carefully from my father’s lap as he led his party through all the dangers in Baldur’s Gate. I still have the two games of this series always installed on my computer. Since then, the subjects surrounding everything fantasy related have never stopped grabbing my interest. Not surprisingly, almost 7 years ago I dared to jump from books and games into the actual Pen and Paper, where I first participated as a player and then very quickly discovered my actual calling as a dungeon master for me. Several books, tavern evenings and “almost” tpks later I still wear the mantle of DM and am happy to share my experiences here. 

As a dungeon master, you might encounter your own personal array of different challenges. Where the heroes are planning and strategizing how they can gain entrance to the ancient mage’s dungeon without getting annihilated, the master is feverishly pondering whether the basement window the heroes are looking for might even exist. And, if it does, what would it look like, how is it guarded, and where does it actually lead? Today I would like to demonstrate to the dungeon masters in our midst how draw.io can be successfully introduced as a solution to our troubles.

Never forget what happened and when it happened

When a campaign has been running for some time, or there is a lengthy hiatus between sessions, memories of events that have taken place can start to fade, and both players and DMs may forget key plot points and details. To avoid that you’ll have to bribe your best friend with new dice to give you her notes; as I did, I created this timeline to provide you with an easy-to-understand record of each session.

This timeline does not have to be available exclusively to the DM but can also be easily replicated using draw.io and shared with players.

The easiest way to do this is in Confluence itself, because a Confluence instance with draw.io is free for up to ten users; more than enough members of an average pen and paper group. You can use Confluence as a wiki for your adventures, which makes it possible to link the text within the diagrams directly to the corresponding Confluence page, as in the example timeline, and thus enrich the diagram interactively.

I give each entry in the timeline an appropriate title to remind me of what happened in the session. In addition, I give a short description of the events that took place, which I then link to a Confluence page, where all other important information is written down.

To further improve the clarity, I always provide each entry with icons that remind me of the sessions’ and quests’ focus. In this way, these simple reminders help me to remember events quickly.

Keep track of all your story arcs

Now and then, I get lost in the leafy forest of my documents or lose the scribbled paper pages of my notes between sessions in the twisting Nether.
What was that about the quest again? Where has the villain fled to in the last session, and for what reason?

To better overview the structured or more random sequences, I have created a template with draw.io that shows the flow of each adventure section. The adventure stretches over several sub-acts and pursues a more significant main storyline. Naturally, this structure is also suitable for short adventures. The template itself is entirely flexible and, therefore, best suited for the dynamic events of the adventure plot.

So, after introducing the setting and world, you can directly introduce the first story elements. Here we dungeon masters begin to sprinkle the first pieces of intriguing information for the group. Depending on the planned adventure, these are either deliberately overheard conversations or, if it must be the sledgehammer, it can also be a burning village. In my template below I have suggested a very urgent hook that represents a current problem that needs to be solved to plunge the group into the adventure while teasing minor threats in the backdrop that might escalate throughout the story.

The template is not set in stone, of course, and can be expanded and branched out as needed. This graphic also makes it possible to keep track of multiple storylines running simultaneously. The basic idea is that you get a clear overview supporting further planning and do not lose vital parts of each arc.

I suggest keeping any diagrams created this way close at hand when dming.

Defeat confusion through the power of visualization

I’ve often had players take the wrong path to travel to a location they’ve already visited, only to look in my direction in confusion and wonder, “Wasn’t the tavern in the lower district?” or “Wait, we are underneath the city?” usually followed by various wild interjections from other players in an attempt to provide the correct piece of information, which is usually also wrong.

But where does this confusion originate?

Often there is no culprit here. Such problems reside in the nature of Pen & Paper. The DM can have a clear picture of his location in his head and have the most polished description of it, and still, players will often need clarification. The DM’s description produces a varying understanding in the minds of the players. Sometimes uttered words are misinterpreted or misunderstood. This confusion can lead to long and complicated explanations, and the game flow can come to a grinding halt.

A quick solution to avoid misunderstandings about geographical locations can be point-to-point maps. They provide a simple overview of where exactly something is to be found. This orientation can be just as helpful for building cities as it is for building dungeons and can be constructed quickly with the help of a whiteboard.

The practicality of using draw.io in Confluence here is rooted in the possibility of either getting your players onto the whiteboard in collaboration, the visual representation helping to answer or avoid layout questions. A board like this could also be shared with other masters who can help and provide feedback directly, so that you can prep and wrap up your sessions in an even more systematic way.

The example I built here shows a cross-section of a completely unknown city with several layers of ancient ruins below it. Each connector represents the available routes between the various sites. This overview is then extended by additional shapes and enables the DM to identify precisely what happens along the path. For this, each shape found on the connectors represents an individual state or challenge for the group.

A locked door? A trap? Or is it an ambush of the frightening 1d6 muggers?

With draw.io at your side, such illustrative overviews are built quickly, without the need for material components.

I hope that I could give the DMs of us some helpful suggestions on how diagrams can help you to bring your sessions to life. And for everyone else to show how powerful visualization can help in a variety of areas.
Because draw.io is not only a tool that supports you in your daily business life and stands by your side as a helping partner, but can just as well lead to success in your private endeavours.

Want to power-up your next meeting with a draw.io whiteboard? You can try draw.io for Confluence or Jira free for 30 days, just visit the Atlassian Marketplace to start your evaluation.

Need more inspiration? Check out these resources:

• Blog – How to Collaborate with draw.io’s Whiteboards
• Blog – Use the draw.io Board Macro in Agile and Scrum meetings
• Video – How to use whiteboards in draw.io
• draw.io Whitebaords Landing Page: https://drawio-app.com/draw-io-whiteboard/

Join our involuntary heroes again this week as their path back home is thwarted by a raging fiery inferno. Faced with the reality that innocent bystanders need the help of the “agile four”, they are forced to reconsider and, together with King Gaudenz, they set out to brave the relentless flames. Are their honed collaboration skills going to be enough to meet the challenge? Or will their adventure end before it has even really begun? Let’s find out together!

King Gaudenz whirls around fiercely, his spine rigid and his face showing hard determination. “It would seem to me that your departure must be slightly postponed.” With a firm step, the monarch hurries back toward the throne room. “Please, take a seat in my banquet hall and await my return.”

Before the king has finished uttering his last words, Marcus raises his hand and hurries after him. “Wait, I will accompany you! We might not be heroes, but we can do things, right? I’m not going to simply stand around while people need help”.

The rest of his group exchanges brief glances. “To think I was actually invited to a party tonight…”, Angie sighs, as her legs start moving to follow Marcus and Gaudenz.

“Yeah this looks more like a total party killer to me,” Pauline mutters as she and Caroline hurry to catch the king. They’re certainly not going to sit around here when Marcus puts himself in danger.

The king points towards the stables. “I’m afraid we’ll have to saddle the horses ourselves my friends! Follow me there is not a moment to hesitate.”

A precious handful of minutes later, the riders are galloping through the cobblestoned streets of Connectalot. The steady rhythm of hooves resounds like thunder echoing off the once inhabited half-timbered houses in which now only the smell of fire and smoke seems to be at home. At breakneck pace, the helpers rush around a last corner, already experiencing the scorching heat on their skin as they pass the last house. In front of them spreads the multi-storey construction of the chapel, wrapped nearly completely in flames and acrid, black smoke.

A crowd of soot-smeared survivors has already formed a bucket brigade, but there are too few of them to stop the inferno. Gaudenz swings himself off his skittish horse in one fluid motion, unbuttoning the brooch of his cloak and letting it slide carelessly to the ground. “King Gaudenz is here, take courage!” shouts a voice from the crowd.

“I cannot spot Father App anywhere around here,” Gaudenz bellows to his companions over the deafening inferno. “I will assist my people here and buy you more time, I beg of you see if you can retrieve the father and rescue him”.

Marcus hurries towards the main entrance, while the rest of his colleagues follow him. But his footsteps become slower and slower, “Guys, the entrance! The tower is collapsing and parts of it are blocking our way! What now?”. Heavy burning beams of solid wood lie on top of each other, making it impossible to reach the large double doors of the chapel.

“Maybe there’s a side that’s not burning yet?!” roars Angie, keeping a proper distance from the flames, the smell of burnt fur mixing with the smoke.

Caroline walks past her friends and heads straight for the burning beam blockade. She squares her shoulders, gets down on her knees and reaches directly into the flames with a strong grip. She clutches a sturdy crossbeam and begins to lift it. A thick vein emerges from her neck, the muscles in her arms tense to the breaking point, but the log lifts only a few inches. “Not enough,” Caroline thinks to herself as the flames reach greedily for her.

Marcus and Pauline both hurry to Caroline’s side. Marcus puts a hand on her shoulder ready to pull her away, but when he touches her, a strange golden light emanates from him to her and the beam lifts a few more inches. “It’s no good Caroline, you’d need three of you to move those beams-“. Inspired by Marcus’ words, Pauline raises both hands and loudly shouts words in an unfamiliar language. Immediately, Caroline’s figure grows to twice her normal size. She effortlessly pulls out the beam, spins in one impossibly swift action, and hurls it like a spear against the church door. As if struck by a battering ram, it blows asunder. “-or maybe just one really big Caroline,” Marcus whispers, who stares dumbfounded at the now towering figure next to him.

“Guys?” shouts Pauline, whose begins to levitate off the ground, a cold light in her eyes. “Clear the way!”. Caroline grabs Marcus like a toddler and dives to safety, just before a cone of ice and snow erupts from the elf and bursts into the inferno.

“Am I the only one here who doesn’t do cool stuff like this?” the dwarf yells from the embrace of his PMM.

Angie seizes the chance and dashes down the icy aisle, pressed close to the ground. She doesn’t seem to mind the difficult terrain, as she sprints sniffing into the depths of the chapel, relying on her fine nose. “Back here, I found him,” Angie shouts, pointing to two legs emerging from a pile of smoldering rubble, “That must be Father App?”. Unable to follow the lithe feline, Caroline instead breaks through a barricade of burning timber, the other two teammates following in her wake. Caroline snatches the unconscious man out of the debris and the group turns towards the entrance, but the path leading back is again swallowed by flames. More beams rain down from the ceiling, and a deafening groan signals the building’s impending collapse. Caroline charges forward through the flames, forging a path for her friends with her free arm, her sights set on one of the colorful stained glass windows. With a final roar, the rescuers break through the glass almost simultaneously, falling a few feet and landing with varying degrees of grace on the hard pavement of the street.

Caroline rolls off and cries for help immediately, the limp body of Father App in her arms, as she reverts to her natural stature. King Gaudenz shoulders past a flock of bystanders, but horror spreads across his face as he sees the priest’s lifeless body. He raises a bony finger and gestures to Marcus, “Quickly, we have no time to lose; cleric, bring him back from the brink, harness your power!”.

Marcus stares at him in confusion, but then stumbles towards the priest and falls heavily to his knees. He reaches out with both hands towards the pallid priest. “I don’t know any mantras, but maybe with a little luck…” Marcus focuses his thoughts inward, and soon a golden light streams from his palms and extends into Father App’s body. The priest starts coughing heavily as Marcus stumbles backwards, staring dumbfounded at his hands.

“Do you see the power that resides within all of you, see what you can accomplish?” Gaudenz’s soot-smeared face seems to take on a new life as he kneels beside Marcus. “You are just beginning to comprehend what you can achieve! Stay, save our kingdom from darkness!”.

The group rises from the ground as bystanders rush to take the still fragile and coughing priest to the other injured. “Maybe there is some good we can do after all. And, we can leave any time if it gets too dangerous, right?” asks Pauline, rubbing the growing bump on her head.

Marcus and Caroline nod in agreement, and only Angie still appears indecisive, nursing the several burn marks in her fur. “This could kill us, guys. We aren’t in Texas anymore. We don’t know anything at all about this!”.

“Then we should find someone who can shed light on this,” the beaming Gaudenz interrupts her, “it’s time we found Atlas!”.

Diagramming Inspiration

When things have to move swiftly, processes can easily become confusing. Swimlane diagrams can provide a quick solution at a single glance. Whether it is the individual steps to rescue a person from a burning church or to visualize complex processes in everyday business operations makes no difference! With the draw.io swimlane template you can build such a diagram in the blink of an eye!

Want to power-up your next meeting with a draw.io whiteboard? You can try draw.io for Confluence or Jira free for 30 days, just visit the Atlassian Marketplace to start your evaluation.

Need more inspiration? Check out these resources:

• Blog – How to Collaborate with draw.io’s Whiteboards
• Blog – Use the draw.io Board Macro in Agile and Scrum meetings
• Video – How to use whiteboards in draw.io
• draw.io Whitebaords Landing Page: https://drawio-app.com/draw-io-whiteboard/

Whiteboards are great tools for keeping track of ideas during brainstorming, for encouraging team members to build on each other’s ideas, and to provide an easily-accessible “source of truth” after the brainstorming session is over. While you can use physical dry-erase boards, digital tools like draw.io offer distinct advantages for the modern workplace.

Since the team at draw.io is celebrating all things fantasy, we thought we’d take a look at the most famous brainstorming session in the genre: the Council of Elrond, where representatives from the different peoples of Middle Earth came together to determine the fate of their world, aka what to do with the One Ring. Could a little digital whiteboarding have prevented the breaking of the Fellowship? What tools can help you stay on track when you don’t have a 6000-year old elf-lord facilitating your meeting? Read on to find out!

Why you should use digital whiteboarding for your next meeting

For countless ages whiteboarding has been a powerful tool for brainstorming, but the world is changed, and now is the time of the digital whiteboard – after all, they’re fast to use, easy to share, allow for remote collaboration, and are easier to iterate than old fashioned whiteboards. And unlike physical whiteboards, there’s no space limit, so you are free to jot down as many ideas as you like. By using shapes, anchor points, and arrows instead of dry-erase markers and sticky notes, ideas can be moved around easily, and even linked to other content.

For an effective brainstorming session, it’s important that everyone is free to share their ideas, without worrying about being right or wrong. Just as wizards, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men, all brought different perspectives and knowledge to the Council, you’ll want to encourage an environment where everyone can put their ideas on the table. With digital whiteboarding, teams can join in from multiple time zones, and draw.io’s live collaboration feature means multiple people can add their ideas at once. Who knows what extra insight the Council could have gotten if Radagast the Brown was able to join in remotely?

Another advantage of a digital whiteboard vs a physical board is that it’s easier to keep your brainstorming session as a central source of truth. Dry-erase boards tend to get erased, and a photo still has to be stored online somewhere. We think Boromir for one, could have used the reminder of why the Ring was not sent to Gondor. Or perhaps Frodo would have had an easier time onboarding Faramir, if he could have shared their original brainstorming session, with comments from Gandalf himself. Digital whiteboards also make it easier to build on your ideas if a follow-up session is needed, or to clean up your brainstorm for presentation.

Tips and Techniques for Digital Whiteboarding

Set a clear goal for your session – Whether you are exploring possible features for a new product, or answering the threat of Mordor, you should have a clear question that you are trying to answer, or a problem that you are trying to solve.

Add structure to your brainstorm – While a brainstorming session should be open to creative ideas, it can help to provide some structure so you’re clear on what kinds of ideas are needed. One advantage of a digital whiteboarding tool like draw.io, is that you can easily add templates to your board, including flowcharts, SWOT diagrams, brainwriting boards and more.

Link to other materials – The Council of Elrond had to draw upon reports from all over Middle Earth in order to make their decision, and you might also want to connect your brainstorming session to other sources of knowledge. With draw.io, you can easily create links in your whiteboard to other Confluence pages.

A Better Council of Elrond

In the film version of the Council of Elrond, the power of the Ring corrupts the hearts of those present, causing the meeting to break down into in-fighting. A digital discussion, where all parties are safe in their kingdoms, could have allowed for less fighting, input from more people, and freer discussion, safe from the negative influence of the Ring. And while the Council never gets that heated up in the novel, perhaps in a digital whiteboarding session some introverted elf would have felt comfortable enough to bring up the idea of flying to Mordor on the back of an eagle. Of course, the idea still would have been rejected, but at least it would have been brought to the table and the question laid to rest once and for all.

So the next time you need to determine the fate of the free peoples of Middle Earth, or just figure out what to do for a corporate event, consider using a digital whiteboard tool like draw.io.

Would you like to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on Social media and learn how others use draw.io and hopefully pick up some tips and tricks.

Join Team draw.io as we explore the world of diagramming through the lens of a fantastic adventure story. Over the coming months this serialized tale of mystery will be posted bi-weekly, and we hope you find it a fun way to absorb diagramming inspiration. Let’s dive into the story:

It’s an unseasonably cold day in Austin, Texas, and a cool breeze is blowing outside the offices of Inatech, a game developer famous for the “Planet of Battlecraft” titles. Up on the 14th floor, four team members are gathered together for their least favorite task of the week – their regular status update meeting with their project manager. Little do they know that what seems like a regular 9-5 workday will soon become a struggle for life or death.

Double latte in hand, Product Marketing Manager Caroline strides into the meeting room, finding herself listening to yet another argument; Project Manager, Bill, is once again sparring with Lead Software Engineer, Pauline. Sitting down in her usual spot at the table, she shares a knowingly glance with her already-seated teammates, Product Manager Angie and Agile Coach Marcus. It’s clear it will be ‘another one of those’ meetings.

“I’m just saying, Bill, we can be more efficient in these meetings if we used a digital whiteboard. We could collaborate better, keep track of ideas better, and if someone was away they could still contribute remotely.” sighs a frustrated Pauline. She’s got her laptop open to a Confluence page, where she’s showing off a retrospective whiteboard.

Bill holds up his hands, “oooh, yeah, well I’m not considering a new tool right now. If we could, uh, go ahead and stick with our normal tool, e-Plan2000, that’d be great.”

“That’s the brilliant part!” says Pauline. “There are already whiteboards built into our diagramming product. We don’t need another tool!”

Shaking his head, and pushing his glasses back up his nose, Bill says “yeah, I’m going to have to ask you to use e-Plan2000. And I see Caroline is here, so we can get started, m’kay?”

Bill turns towards his flip chart, and the room can see he has prepared nearly 30 charts. Caroline looks down at the cup in her hand, silently cursing that she didn’t go for a triple latte.

Just then, the lights in the room start to flicker. Slowly, the team becomes aware of a dull rumbling sound, and it’s building in volume. Before long, the blinds are rattling in the windows, and dust is falling from ceiling. The floor itself begins to vibrate, and soon the team is having problems even standing up. “Earthquake!” someone yells. A brilliant flash fills the room! Suddenly, a blinding rainbow of colours bursts out from the center of the conference room table. As though grabbed by an invisible hand, a mysterious force pulls Caroline, Marcus, Angie and Pauline towards the portal, and in an instant they find themselves materialized onto a cold stone floor.

Acrid smoke hangs in the air. Disoriented, Caroline blinks her eyes a few times to clear her head, and soon she perceives a murmur of voices around them. A hand reaches down, offering to pull Caroline to her feet, and when she rises up she sees an elderly man dressed in a long luxurious robe, a golden crown perched on his head. Behind him rises an ornate throne, flanked by what looks like the most dedicated Robin Hood cosplayers she’s ever seen. As she comes to her sense, she hears Marcus’ familiar voice behind her say “uh, guys…why am I so small?”.

Caroline turns to see an amazing sight – her three co-workers are human beings no longer. Somehow, Pauline has the long pointy ears of an elf, Marcus is a short and bearded dwarf, and, shockingly, Angie is now some kind of humanoid cat. For herself, she is shocked to find her previously unimposing frame is now rippling with muscles.

It’s all too much. As her team members begin to panic, Caroline feels her own fear begin to rise up in her throat. Is it a dream? A nightmare?

The presumed King claps his hands loudly, then raises them to calm things down. “Please, Caroline, Pauline, Marcus, and Angie, be at peace. You are safe here, and the disorientation of your journey should abate soon. I can explain everything.”

Breathing heavily, the team turns their attention to the wizened old man.

“I am King Gaudenz the Elder, and I welcome you to my home. I apologize for your traumatic journey, and that you were taken without permission, but circumstances do not permit me the usual pleasantries.” The king leans in close, his eyes growing sad. “You see, I had no choice because the very lives of my people are at stake. There is a darkness on the horizon, one that I can no longer battle alone. And the only thing standing in its way…is you.”

This week’s diagramming inspiration

No one likes painful meetings. Using digital whiteboards, like those inside draw.io, help keep meetings on track, and your team more productive. As Pauline mentions in our story, a side benefit to draw.io’s whiteboards is that remote team members can easily contribute at the same time as those working in a physical office.

Want to power-up your next meeting with a draw.io Whiteboard? You can try draw.io for Confluence or Jira free for 30 days, just visit the Atlassian Marketplace to start your evaluation.

Need more inspiration? Check out these resources:

• Blog – How to Collaborate with draw.io’s Whiteboards
• Blog – Use the draw.io Board Macro in Agile and Scrum meetings
• Video – How to use whiteboards in draw.io
• draw.io Whitebaords Landing Page: https://drawio-app.com/draw-io-whiteboard/

Do you like to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on Social media and learn how others use draw.io and hopefully pick up some tips and tricks.

Gitflow diagrams can be a valuable tool for coordinating development efforts and ensuring that code is properly organized and maintained. Additionally, they can be used as a reference for new team members to quickly understand the branching model used in a project.

If your team uses Confluence, draw.io’s whiteboard editor offers an easy way to design your Gitflow diagram right in your project page. Read on to learn more, or visit the Atlassian Marketplace to try the app.

draw.io’s whiteboard editor

draw.io’s whiteboard macro uses our intuitive drag-and-drop diagram builder, with a simplified editor so you have more space to sketch out your ideas. With draw.io installed, open your Confluence page and insert the draw.io Board macro to get started.

Working with a template

While you may find it helpful to build your own Gitflow diagram from scratch, you can also start out with a pre-built template. To access draw.io’s Gitflow template, click on the boxed plus sign in the left-hand menu, and then select Template…

In the template library, choose the Software category and scroll down until your find the Gitflow template, then press Insert. With the diagram inserted you can now add or remove nodes, edit the labels and make it your own.

If you prefer to build your own Gitflow diagram from square one, the process can be just as fast as modifying the template.

Creating your master branch

In a Gitflow diagram, the master branch is the main branch where the official release history is recorded. Start your branch by adding a circle shape to the board – you can click and drag it from the shapes panel, or simply press the F key. Each circle in this branch will represent a different production release of your project.

You can resize and stretch the circle with the handles of the bounding box, and modify the color and line style from the format menu on the right. Once you are happy with the look of your circle, click the Set as Default Style option in the format menu. This will apply the same styling to any other shapes you add to the board. Finally, double click on the circle to label it with the version number.

To add your next production release node, click on the first circle, and select the arrows outside the bounding box. You can either click and drag to create an arrow ending in another circle, or click the arrow and select the shape you want, in this case a circle.

Just like the circles, you can also style the lines between nodes, changing their color and stroke, and the formatting will be automatically applied to the next line you create.

You can repeat this process for as many version numbers as you need, updating the labels as you go. Finally, if you want to add a legend to your diagram, you can finish your main branch by selecting a square shape instead of a circle and labelling it “Master Branch”.

Add your project, feature and development branches

Depending on the scope of your diagram, your next branch could represent a project, a feature, or the development of pre-production code.

To create your second branch, copy and paste one of the circles from the master branch and then change the color, remembering to Set as Default Style. Once again use the blue arrows to clone as many nodes as you need for this branch, and finish with a square shape to label the branch.

Alternatively, you can simply copy and paste the entire first branch, and with all your nodes selected, change their color. If you need to change the spacing between nodes, just click and drag them into position and the lines will automatically adjust. Add any extra nodes, and then finish by updating your labels.

Repeat the process to create branches for features, hotfixes and whatever other supporting branches are required.

Connect the branches

In a Gitflow diagram, the connections between branches represent the flow of changes between them, indicating which changes have been merged or integrated into which branches. These connections help to visualize the relationship between different branches, and can help your team understand the overall evolution of the codebase.

To connect the branches in your diagram, hover your cursor over a circle and select one of the anchor points around its edge. Click and drag from there to the destination circle. You can style the connecting line, and you can also change the curve of the line by clicking on it and dragging the blue anchor point.

Using libraries

draw.io’s board editor is designed with a streamlined set of shapes and tools, but there are plenty of other icons and images available if you need them. In the left-hand menu, click the plus sign and then Shapes to open the larger library. You can use the search bar to find the specific shape you want, search by use case, and even upload your own images.

With a clear and concise diagram, you and your team can gain a deeper understanding of your codebase, and more effectively manage and collaborate your projects, all within Confluence. Visit the Atlassian Marketplace to find out more about draw.io and get started.

Do you like to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on Social media and learn how others use draw.io and hopefully pick up some tips and tricks.