Summary

Developers frequently communicate about their job using sequence diagrams. Each step in a sequence diagram might be related to a task defined in a kanban tool such as Trello. Looking at the diagram, it is hard to tell which task is related to which step. We can make this connection more visible by defining both the tasks and the diagram in the same tool - Notion, in this example - and rendering the sequence diagram with a script that uses Notion's API for fetching the defined diagram and tasks. The result is displayed here.

Movation

Tables

First, we define a table containing all the tasks. Ignore the Sequence diagram step column for now.

Tasks example

Then, we define a table that represents the sequence diagram. Each diagram step is listed in order.

Sequence diagram

This table represents the following diagram:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/67a7888b-2459-4209-838c-1b7c6b753e03/out.png

The crux of the problems is how to link the diagram to the tasks. This is possible because is connected to through the Task column. This column is a relation. You can think of it as a join operation in SQL.

In this way, adding a Task to a sequence diagram step is quite simple: just click on Task and all tasks will be listed. Then, you can choose one or more tasks. Alternatively, in the table, you can link a task on the Sequence diagram step column. Note that you can't reproduce this behavior on this page because it's read-only.