  Communication between practitioners is essential for the system's quality in
the DevOps context. To improve this communication, practitioners often use
informal diagrams to represent the components of a system. However, as systems
evolve, it is a challenge to synchronize diagrams with production environments
consistently. Hence, the inconsistency of architectural diagrams can affect
communication between practitioner and their understanding of systems. In this
paper, we propose the use of system descriptors to improve deployment diagram
consistency. We state two main hypotheses: (1) if an architectural diagram is
generated from a valid system descriptor, then the diagram is consistent; (2)
if a valid system descriptor is generated from an architectural diagram, then
the diagram is consistent. We report a case study to explore our hypotheses.
Furthermore, we constructed a system descriptor from the Netflix deployment
diagram, and we applied our tool to generate a new architectural diagram.
Finally, we compare the original and generated diagrams to evaluate our
proposal. Our case study shows all Docker compose description elements can be
graphically represented in the generated architectural diagram, and the
generated diagram does not present inconsistent aspects of the original
diagram. Thus, our preliminary results lead to further evaluation in controlled
and empirical experiments to test our hypotheses.
