General guidance for diagramming

[mark_s]

Dear Forum,

Being a relative newcomer to Archimate and Archi tool, I'm looking to have a bit of a steer on some tips for diagramming.  Having come from using TOGAF / Visio, things were a bit simpler to manage, create a page and off you go.

My question is around where to start diagramming, and if a general rule is to start with a "Layered View" and use that to add all the key elements.  After which sub-views such as Application Cooperation can derive from.

Thanks for tips / advice.

Regards, Mark

[Xiaoqi]

Hi Mark,

Just in my view for your reference, there's no correct point or not to start diagramming, the key thing is "diagramming is the certain level of abstraction of your real world", so when and how to start diagramming depends on your audience (stakeholders) and use case (situation), which mean you need first listing down what kind of message you want to convey to your counterpart, only with that clear then you choose a diagramming tool to support you to make that abstrction.

After this kind of "theory", when talking our Layered View, I suggest following 3 resources which I learnt a lot when practicing Archi / ArchiMate:

• ArchiMate Cookbook from Holistic Enterprise Development
• ArchiSurance case study from Open Group (Finance Industry)
• ArchiMetal case study from Open Group (Manufacturing Industry)

You can find their links from my summarized page here in GitHub: https://github.com/yasenstar/ArchiMate-Cookbook.

Try and good luck!
Xiaoqi

[Alberto]

And if you want to get serious with Archimate, and understand the logic behind the archimate metamodel, I would highly recommend "Mastering ArchiMate" by Gerben Wierda (I believe an 3.2 edition is in the works)

[mark_s]

Many Thanks for the suggestions. Will do further reading