Table of Questions
Here you find an overview of frequently asked questions. The following table is generated1 from the complete book by parsing the markdown source.
| ID/Link | Questions |
|---|---|
| Question A-1 | What does the 42 mean? |
| Question A-2 | What’s the license? |
| Question A-3 | What’s the pricing model of arc42? |
| Question A-4 | How widely is arc42 used? |
| Question A-5 | What’s the target audience of architecture documentation? |
| Question A-6 | What are possible alternatives to arc42? |
| Question A-7 | For what kinds of systems is arc42 applicable? |
| Question A-8 | In which cases shall we NOT use arc42? |
| Question A-9 | How can I contribute or report bugs in arc42? |
| Question B-1 | Which parts of arc42 are “essential”, which are “optional”? |
| Question B-2 | Does arc42 prescribe or enforce specific notations? |
| Question B-3 | Shall I use UML for arc42 documentation? |
| Question B-4 | What is the minimal amount of an arc42 documentation? |
| Question B-5 | Where to document external interfaces? |
| Question B-6 | How to document external interfaces? |
| Question B-7 | Where to put links to external systems (“neighbors”) documentation? |
| Question B-8 | What is a blackbox / the blackbox template? |
| Question B-9 | What is a whitebox? |
| Question B-10 | What is the building block hierarchy? |
| Question B-11 | How to document a whitebox with the whitebox template |
| Question B-12 | Where shall I describe important (blackbox) components? |
| Question B-13 | Can I use arc42 in agile projects, e.g. with Scrum? |
| Question B-14 | Can I update documentation incrementally? Or shall I document after the implementation is finished? |
| Question B-15 | What kind of information shall I provide for which stakeholder? |
| Question B-16 | What does economical documentation mean? |
| Question C-1-1 | How extensive shall I describe the requirements of the system? |
| Question C-1-2 | What are quality goals (aka quality attributes)? |
| Question C-1-3 | Why does arc42 propose a stakeholder table? |
| Question C-1-4 | What shall be included in a stakeholder table? |
| Question C-1-5 | What are the expected deliverables in the stakeholder table? |
| Question C-2-1 | What are constraints? |
| Question C-2-2 | What types of constraints exist? |
| Question C-2-3 | What kind of constraints shall I document? |
| Question C-2-4 | Can/shall we negotiate constraints? |
| Question C-3-1 | What is the context (scope)? |
| Question C-3-2 | How shall I document the context (scope)? |
| Question C-3-3 | What is the “business context”? |
| Question C-3-4 | What is the “technical context”? |
| Question C-3-5 | In which cases shall I document the “business context”? |
| Question C-3-6 | In which cases shall I document the “technical context”? |
| Question C-3-7 | How can I simplify documentation of the “business context”? |
| Question C-3-8 | Shall I document risks or problems in the context? |
| Question C-4-1 | What is the “solution strategy”? |
| Question C-4-2 | How to document the “solution strategy”? |
| Question C-4-3 | Can you provide examples for the solution strategy? |
| Question C-5-1 | What is a “building block”? |
| Question C-5-2 | Do third-party libraries, frameworks or tools count among building blocks? |
| Question C-5-3 | How does source code relate to building blocks? |
| Question C-5-4 | How detailed shall we document the building block view? |
| Question C-5-5 | Can I refine a group of building blocks together? |
| Question C-5-6 | How can I document or specify building blocks? |
| Question C-5-7 | How shall I document building blocks for non-object-oriented systems? |
| Question C-5-8 | How do I describe internal interfaces? |
| Question C-5-9 | How do I describe external interfaces? |
| Question C-5-10 | How can I avoid redundancy with interfaces in the building block view? |
| Question C-5-11 | How does the hierarchy of building blocks relate to the arc42 sections (5.1, 5.2 etc.)? |
| Question C-5-12 | What kind of building blocks don’t I need to document or specify? |
| Question C-5-13 | What kind of building blocks shall I document or specify? |
| Question C-6-1 | What is a runtime scenario? |
| Question C-6-2 | What do I document in the runtime view? |
| Question C-6-3 | How can I describe scenarios or execution flows? |
| Question C-6-4 | What are partial scenarios? |
| Question C-6-5 | Which scenarios shall I describe or document? |
| Question C-7-1 | What does the deployment view show? |
| Question C-7-2 | Why do I need a deployment view? |
| Question C-7-3 | Who shall describe/document the deployment view? |
| Question C-7-4 | Shall I use UML deployment diagrams for the deployment view? |
| Question C-7-5 | Can there be different deployment scenarios or variants? |
| Question C-7-6 | What shall I do when my building blocks get dynamically assigned an execution environment (node) - so I cannot statically assign them to infrastructure nodes? |
| Question C-8-1 | What is a crosscutting concept? |
| Question C-8-2 | Our arc42 section 8 (on concepts) is a melting pot of information we couldn’t put elsewhere? How can we keep an overview? |
| Question C-8-3 | How shall I deal with the multitude of potentially crosscutting topics? |
| Question C-8-4 | How shall I describe my business-/domain model? |
| Question C-8-5 | Are there any general rules how to describe a concept? |
| Question C-9-1 | What kind of decisions shall I describe or document? |
| Question C-9-2 | How can I document an architectural decision? |
| Question C-9-3 | What’s an Architecture Decision Record (ADR)? |
| Question C-9-4 | How can we handle a large number of architecture decisions? |
| Question C-10-1 | What is Software Quality? |
| Question C-10-2 | What is a quality scenario? |
| Question C-10-3 | What is a quality tree? |
| Question C-10-4 | Are there examples for quality scenarios? |
| Question C-11-1 | What are risks and technical debt? |
| Question D-0 | Why do I need a model? I have source code. |
| Question D-1 | What alternatives to UML exist for architecture models? |
| Question D-2 | How to arc42 and UML relate to each other? |
| Question D-3 | How can I use UML to communicate a hierarchy of building blocks? |
| Question D-4 | How can I describe interfaces with UML? |
| Question D-5 | What can I use UML ports for? |
| Question D-6 | How can I improve the understandability of my diagrams/models? |
| Question D-7 | How can I reduce the number of elements in a component /building block diagram? |
| Question D-8 | How can I improve the consistency of models? |
| Question E-1 | Does arc42 work with Scrum, Kanban or other lean/agile approaches? |
| Question E-2 | Shall our team make arc42 part of the definition of done (DoD)? |
| Question E-3 | How can arc42 help us in reducing documentation effort? |
| Question E-4 | We use Scrum. How can we integrate arc42 into our sprints? |
| Question E-5 | In agile projects, what kind of information shall we write down and what shall we communicate orally? |
| Question E-6 | In agile projects, can we skip (defer) documentation for a while and focus only on implementing? |
| Question E-7 | What are the most important tips for documentation in agile projects? |
| Question F-1 | What tools are well-suited for arc42? |
| Question F-2 | What are useful criteria for selecting a toolset for arc42? |
| Question F-3 | Can I automatically include important code artifacts in arc42 documentation? |
| Question F-4 | How do I use arc42 with modeling tools? |
| Question F-5 | How can I use arc42 together with Sparx Enterprise Architect(r) |
| Question F-6 | Are there (free or open-source) modeling tools available? |
| Question F-7 | Can we use arc42 with the Atlassian Confluence wiki? |
| Question F-8 | What tools can I use to setup arc42 in Confluence? |
| Question F-9 | How can I create diagrams in Confluence? |
| Question F-10 | What tools shall I use for sequence diagrams? |
| Question F-10 | Can I use PlantUML for building block / component diagrams? |
| Question G-1 | Shall I version control our architecture documentation? |
| Question G-2 | We cannot use version control for documents. What to do? |
| Question G-3 | How does versioning work with graphical models? |
| Question G-4 | How can I describe several variants of a system? |
| Question H-1 | What does traceability mean (with arc42)? |
| Question H-2 | Shall we strive for traceability in our documentation? |
| Question H-3 | How can I keep architecture documentation in sync with source code? |
| Question J-1 | How to document (very) large systems with arc42 |
| Question J-2 | Does a documentation governance make sense for architecture documentation? |
| Question J-3 | Is there a checklist for arc42 documentation? |
| Question J-4 | Is there a general checklist for architecture documentation? |
| Question J-5 | How can I create delta-documentation with arc42? |
| Question J-6 | What level of access permissions shall stakeholders have on the architecture documentation? |
| Question K-1 | Are we allowed to customize arc42 for our (company/organization/system…) purpose? |
| Question K-2 | What kinds of customizations are common for arc42? |