Solution Architecture Modeling with ArchiMate at DLT Labs

After a year-plus of using it in our processes, I’d like to write a bit about how ArchiMate, a visual modeling language developed for describing enterprise IT architectures, has worked out quite well for us at DLT Labs for documenting architectures at the solution level.

In early 2018 when I joined, DLT Labs was a startup in the blockchain space. We were young as a company but had already assembled a sizable team of talented developers with experience in the nascent field. Their development lifecycle was also surprisingly sophisticated and well managed. I had been hired to work on education and architecture, but if I had imagined there would be low-hanging-fruit in terms of developing internal knowledge, I quickly realized that much of the teaching would be going in the other direction. Indeed, my colleagues have been very generous in passing on their knowledge of blockchain-in-practice, cloud architectures, product design, and more.

One of the areas where I definitely could make an impact was in more formalized architecture. Our developers were innovating but most did not have a background in writing or modeling, so much of the innovation was visible only through examination of the code, itself. Soon, the company would need to communicate this work to investors, partners, intellectual property authorities and, with our growth trend, lots of new developers internally too. So in addition to working on external education (podcasts and the like), I began work on a process for documenting solution architecture. Job One was to decide on a primary modeling language.

Two obvious options were

(1) nothing — that is to say, a free-form boxes and arrows approach — or

(2) the industry standard, UML.

Although many agile shops understandably prefer boxes and arrows, I hoped the structure of using an actual visual language would help developers keep in mind design concepts I considered important. I also hoped it would be suggestive of the sophistication of our other development practices. That left UML. But while looking into the options provided by our cloud-based drawing tools, I also happened to notice an icon set called ArchiMate.