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arc42 [1] provides everything you ever need to communicate and document your software architecture. It’s tool and technology agnostic, therefore you can use arc42 for arbitrary systems. arc42 is open source and completely free to use.

This article provides a quick overview of arc42 and its parts. For more information, please consult the (rather extensive) documentation [2] available on their documentation website (which, since V8/January 2022, contains several practical examples).

arc42 answers the following two questions in a pragmatic way and can be tailored to your specific needs:

If you work under time or resource constraints, you will most likely skip certain parts of arc42. Our upcoming post on „lean documentation“ will give guidance for such cases.

Before we dive in…

drawer cabinet

The structure of arc42

arc42 proposes a dozen sections (aka compartments) for your documentation. These are organized top-down to improve understandability.

arc42 overwiew

1. Introduction and goals

Short description of the requirements and driving forces of your system: You should provide an extract or abstract of requirements. Restrict yourself to the top three (max five) quality requirements for the architecture, which have the highest priority for the major stakeholders.

Include a table of important stakeholders with their expectation regarding architecture or documentation.

intro and goals overwiew

2. Constraints

Anything that constrains teams in design and implementation decisions, or decision about related processes. Constraints can sometimes go beyond individual systems and might valid for whole organizations and companies (e.g. company-wide technology choices or government regulations). Time and money are common constraints in many organizations.

constraints overwiew

3. Context and scope

The context delimits your system from its (external) communication partners (neighboring systems and users). It specifies or documents the external interfaces. You should always document the context from a business or domain perspective. If infrastructure or specific hardware plays an important role, you might also show a technical perspective.

context overwiew

4. Solution strategy

Summary of the fundamental decisions and solution strategies that shape the architecture: can include technology, top-level decomposition, approaches to achieve top quality goals and relevant organizational decisions.

5. Building block view

Usually, boxes and arrows, showing the high-level code structure of the system. To phrase it a little more formal: The building block view explains the static structure of the system and contains, abstractions of source-code. It refines the context view, where the complete system is depicted as a black box.

building block overview

You can drill down to an arbitrary level of detail, but keep in mind the following:

Recommendation Try to stick to level-1, as it often gives enough guidance and understanding for most stakeholders.

6. Runtime view

The runtime view explains the behavior or processing of one or several building blocks. It serves as companion to the static building block view from section 5 above. The runtime view might explain important use cases or features, interactions at critical external interfaces, error and exception behavior.

runtime overview

Recommendation Use runtime scenarios primarily during development to validate or design building block structures. They help to identify missing or unnecessary dependencies. Keep only a small number of scenarios in your documentation.

7. Deployment view

Software needs hardware to execute on, that’s where the deployment view comes into play: It shows the technical infrastructure with environments, computers, processors, networks and network-topologies. In addition, it maps the software building blocks to those infrastructure elements.

deployment overview

8. Cross-cutting concepts

Overall, principal regulations and solution approaches relevant in multiple parts (→ cross-cutting) of the system. Concepts are often related to multiple building blocks. Include different topics like domain models, architecture patterns and -styles, rules for using specific technology and implementation rules.

crosscutting concerns

9. Architecture decisions

Keep a collection of architecturally significant decisions that are important, expensive, critical, large scale or risky including rationales, that are not recorded elsewhere.

Please use your judgement to decide whether an architectural decision should be documented here or whether you better document it locally (e.g. within the building block view or any cross-cutting concept). You may have already captured the most important decisions of your architecture in the solution strategy.

Recommendation: Use Architecture Decision Records to capture decisions in a simple, structured yet pragmatic way.

10. Quality requirements

Quality requirements, often described as scenarios. You may use a quality tree to provide a high-level overview. The most important quality goals should have been already described in section 1.2. (quality).

scenario overview

As the definition of quality scenarios is very abstract, let’s look at some examples:

Topic Scenario
Performance System shall perform all checks on a 100MByte file in less than 10 seconds.
Operability The temperature range in which the correct functioning of the device is ensured should range from -25 degrees to +85 degrees
Maintainability A new additional verification algorithm can be included in less than one day.

11. Risks and technical debt

Known technical risks or technical debt. What potential problems exist within or around the system? What does the development team feel miserable about.

In case somebody reviewed or audited your system, their findings might be included here.

12. Glossary

Important domain and technical terms that stakeholders use when discussing the system. Please include only specific terms - and avoid explaining REST, HTTPS or other words that have common explanations.

In addition, the glossary can serve as the translation reference if you work in a multi-language (international) environment.

glossary overview

Like what you saw?

Give it a try! Document a few of your architecture decisions, sketch your scope and context and explain a few key technical concepts - and you have your first version of your architecture documentation.

Download the template in a format you like. Unpack and start documenting. In case you have questions or want to see examples, consult the extensive documentation site [2].

In case you want to know more, we have you covered:

Comments or questions?

Leave a comment right below - or open an issue on the arc42 site. Otherwise, thanx for reading this article.

Image of the cabinet by Jan Kolar from Unsplash

  1. https://arc42.org. The template has been created by Dr. Peter Hruschka and Dr. Gernot Starke. They published the first version in 2005, after having used predecessor versions for many years in different large and medium–sized projects.  ↩

  2. https://docs.arc42.org. The extensive documentation website, containing more than 140 tips and 30 examples on how to use arc42.  ↩