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Check out practical tips for using arc42, organized by template sections:

  1. Introduction and goals: Requirements, stakeholder, (top) quality goals (24 tips)
  2. Constraints: Technical and organizational constraints, conventions (5 tips)
  3. Context and scope: Business and technical context, external interfaces (19 tips)
  4. Solution strategy: Fundamental solution decisions and ideas (6 tips)
  5. Building block view: Abstractions of source code, black-/whiteboxes (28 tips)
  6. Runtime view: Runtime scenarios: How do building blocks interact (11 tips)
  7. Deployment view: Hardware and technical infrastructure, deployment (10 tips)
  8. Crosscutting concepts: Recurring solution approaches and patterns (11 tips)
  9. Architecture decisions: Important decisions (10 tips)
  10. Quality: Quality tree and quality scenarios (8 tips)
  11. Risks and technical debt: Known problems, risks and technical debt (6 tips)
  12. Glossary: Definitions of important business and technical terms (6 tips)

Our tips are tagged by 56 keywords that will help you navigate. Three of these stand out:

  • lean: You are looking for opportunities to shorten or streamline your documentation pragmatically. You want to reduce efforts without loosing content or value. You are working in an agile environment and want to have lightweight documentation – based on the motto: travel light.
  • thorough: You are working in a more formal environment, e.g. developing very large or critical systems with hard quality requirements. Your stakeholders require thoroughness, accuracy and attention to detail. Maybe your systems and their documentation have to be audited.
  • essential: Despite lean and agile, there is some information about your system that you should always document; i.e. quality goals of your architecture.

Still have questions?

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We're offering architecture training!

The dynamic duo, always two trainers in parallel, practically applicable knowledge from Peter Hruschka and Gernot Starke. See arc42.de for details, and schedule.

We’ve successfully trained more than 1000 developers in software architecture, many of them passed the iSAQB CPSA-F certification. (sorry - public training currently German-only, English for inhouse trainings.)

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This site is completely open-source, maintained on a public Github repository.

Thanx to our partners

We thank our partners Innoq Deutschland GmbH and TecTrain GmbH.