ArchiMate
ArchiMate 3.2 enterprise architecture: business, application, technology, motivation, strategy and migration layers, with all eleven relationships drawn to the specification's own line styles and end decorations. The layer is derived from the element type rather than declared beside it, so the band and the colour cannot disagree.
In the same space
Most users come to ArchiMate from Archi, BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio, Sparx Enterprise Architect or Visual Paradigm (ArchiMate). flowss runs this engine in the browser — no install, shareable via URL, exportable to PNG / SVG / PDF / source.
Syntax at a glance
business-process Handle "Handle order"
layer application
application-component CRM "CRM system"
application-service CrmSvc "Customer data"
CRM realizes CrmSvc
CrmSvc serves HandlePaste this in the Studio code pane to see ArchiMate render live. The full grammar is at the upstream-docs link above.
Sample templates
All 10 →The canonical layered view: a business process served by application services, realized by components, deployed on nodes. Every line is the specific ArchiMate relationship rather than a generic arrow — a component realizes its service and serves the process, which are two different claims that most drawings collapse into one.
Why the architecture is being changed at all, in the layer most models skip. Stakeholders hold drivers, drivers influence goals, goals are realized by requirements, and requirements are realized by the things the other layers build — the only chain that connects a piece of software back to a reason for it.
How five applications actually depend on one another, drawn with flow for what moves and serving for what is used. The distinction is the point: a flow says data travels, a serving says one component needs another to work, and a landscape that draws both as one arrow cannot answer either question.
A deployment view that keeps the two diamonds apart. A node is COMPOSED OF the parts that cannot exist without it (filled diamond) and AGGREGATES the things it merely collects (hollow diamond) — one attribute apart, the pair most often collapsed, and the collapse changes what the model says about lifecycle and ownership.
A business layer view on its own, where the trap is drawing the process chain with the wrong relationship. Triggering is what makes one process follow another; assignment is what puts a role on a process; access is what a process does to an object. Three different lines because they are three different facts, and only triggering carries sequence.
The strategy layer, which exists so a capability map is connected to something rather than floating as a slide. Resources are assigned to capabilities, capabilities realize courses of action, and the courses of action are what the rest of the model is eventually built to deliver.
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