One thing I’ve discovered about not having layout control is that the resulting graph complexity can help give you a hint about the correctness of your solution

One thing I’ve discovered about not having layout control is that the resulting graph complexity can help give you a hint about the correctness of your solution. A couple of years ago I was helping to architect a new system and I decided to use yUML to start showing snippets of what I was thinking. Ultimately everyone starting adding every detail and the picture was unreadable. As we kept iterating we kept updating our yUML text and one time the graph came out beautiful. That actually ended up being really close to the solution we implemented. yUML uses graphviz with the layout set for minimum line crossing. So when your graph looks good and is easy to layout without tons on lines crossing you can use that as a hint that you’re on the right track to a solution that you can keep in your head. And it’s always easier to engineer what you can keep in your head. It’s been a good heuristic for me over the years.