Depending on how you organize your relationships, the diagram can make shared dependencies more clear. If you have multiple levels of inputs and outputs, you m

Depending on how you organize your relationships, the diagram can make shared dependencies more clear. If you have multiple levels of inputs and outputs, you might define a set of relationships together that are all related to a single output. In this case shared inputs are not trivially realizable in the text. E.g. @startuml database DB1 database DB2 ... lots of other artifacts ... artifact ArtifactN DB1 --> Artifact1 ... lots of other input to Artifact1 ... ... other relationships grouped based on output - more than a screenful - only some of which have DB1 as input ... DB1 --> ArtifactN @enduml In the above, it might not be clear how often DB1 is an input to an artifact. Whereas the diagram will show the size of the tree pretty clearly. It is unlikely that such a diagram would be very illustrative to its author, but the visual representation may be a much better communication tool to others who are not as intimately familiar with the system in question.