Draw.io is a free tool to support creation of various diagrams and figures. It supports collaboration and integrates well with Google Docs and other technologies. You can find more information about it here.

The main motivations and goals behind using draw.io are following:

• Express ideas, concepts, designs, processes or anything in a graphical representation
  • A figure is very good mean to communicate or document a thing
  • It makes the documentation more readable and understandable to it's readers
  • It makes the creation of concept, design or architecture easier for the creator
• Make collaboration easy
  • Creating new diagram/figure
  • Sharing the diagram with others
  • Embedding the diagram in documents
• Unify on one tool to create diagrams

The draw.io can be added to Google Drive using these instructions.

The figure below depicts a basic diagram created using draw.io. It was exported using File → Export as → PNG and included to this wiki.

These are just general recommendations how to create diagrams. Nothing is set in stone, but the diagrams should be easy to understand generally. More tips might come in future

• Try to make the diagram simple and easy to understand
• Diagram should generally cover one level of abstraction
  • For complex topics do one high-level diagrams and then more diagrams for particular parts of the high-level one (this is common for architecture)
• Arrows should have the same semantics in one diagram (use different line style to distinguish different semantics or add a description to the line)
• Color the shapes to differentiate between e.g. more/less important things or different types of things

The diagrams can be shared using the same way as for other Google Docs.

The diagram can be exported to various format using the File → Export as Menu. The diagram can be also embedded to a Google Doc using the draw.io add-on for Google Docs (needs to be installed first).