How to Generate Sequence Diagrams in IntelliJ
When the code is complicated or unfamiliar
Unfamiliar code can sometimes drive people crazy. It is much easier for developers to analyze the code, when they have a UML class diagram or something similar. Unfortunately, the IntelliJ Community version does not support UML diagram generation (if you use IntelliJ Ultimate, you can easily extract UML class diagrams).
However, there are other tools that can give you a good view of the code structure. I personally like to have a sequence diagram that captures interactions between group of objects and describes in what order the objects work together. It can be used not only for your personal analysis of the code, but also for documentation and planning.
The horizontal axis shows the object that are involved in the interaction and the vertical axis represents the ordering. Here is an example of the sequence diagram generated from my dummy code.
It took me 1 second to generate this diagram. Having a diagram like this allows you to easily understand how the classes interact.
