Topic 1 / Post 2 – Stack overview / How to begin an Application Architecture

January 20, 2016 / Dennis Holinka

Topic 1 – Stack overview

This week's posts go over the Stack of Enterprise Architecture and the components that it is composed of.  

Post 2 - How to begin an Application Architecture

In EA, it is important to create a systematic approach to the order in which an  architect begins to document and define the application architecture.  It is through modeling, that an architect conveys the organizing logic to the application layer of the business layer.  We know, that the business layer processes are decomposed in requirements which can be used to properly define the application architecture.  Provided below are a few example artifacts followed by a relationship of the linkage between the models and then the creation of the physical application architecture.  Layers in the architecture are broken in conceptual, logical, and physical as to provide increasing detail and elaboration into the model.  The overall process for the meta model for creating an application architecture is as follows:

The Applications Architecture is a collective architecture views which covers at least all of the following artifacts:

1. Business Area Context Diagram

2. Conceptual Application Domain Diagram

3. Logical Application Component Context Diagram

4. Physical Application Component Context Diagram

The application architecture is used to support the desired business and IT capabilities based on the architectural principles, reference models, tools, standards, and guidelines-best-practices as an assessment to identify current landscape of the systems in the enterprise. The technology and product choices, maturity of the application development processes, application architecture frameworks, reference models, skill expertise in a technology domain are important factors in developing the current and target state application architectures.

As I will provide in the next post, we will discuss how enterprise transition architectures for the application architecture as well as enterprise automation architectures for application architecture are all part of documenting the application architecture but for different purposes.

Figure: Business Area Context Diagram [Adapted from Acme Inc]

Figure: Application Component Context Diagram [Adapted from Acme Inc]

Figure: Application Architecture Meta Model [Adapted from Acme Inc]

References:  http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap31.html