About this post: This guest blog was written by Brigitte Meijer, Information Analyst & Requirements Engineer at BmIT. She is a valued collaborator of ours who we regularly hire for consultancy. We have asked her to share her views on our recently released plugin, the XSD Viewer for Confluence. This is what she wrote:

We are currently developing webservices and an ebMS interface for a customer. This involves making a lot of XSD’s…

Previously we wrote the functional and technical documentation for these interfaces in MS Word, made tables explaining the elements by hand and used a development tool to create schematic images. This was a lot of work and it was very difficult to keep the XSD and the documentation in sync.

These days, we write functional and technical documentation for these interfaces directly in Confluence our wiki / intranet. Apart from creating sequence diagrams with Gliffy we now use the new XSD Viewer plugin to generate images and tables of the XSD complex types.

We are very happy with the plugin. We can now easily generate the documentation from the XSD itself, which means the documentation and XSD are always in sync.