Automated transformation of existing documentation (e.g. Enterprise Architect)
Recovering Your Architecture with Existing Documentation
Even if architectural sketches may have existed at the beginning of a project, they might not have been maintained. New requirements and maintenance tasks diluted the original architecture and it has not been consistently reviewed.
Nevertheless, some idea of a basic architecture still exists and rudimentary fragments are still available. From these fragments and assumptions the architectural hypothesis is now put forward. This initial hypothesis is validated by comparing it with the implementation and deviations are resolved in an iterative process. This process is technically based on the architecture review of the Axivion Architecture Verification.
Describe hypothesis - check, adapt and refine it - validate the architecture
Creating Your Documentation from Scratch
Even if there is no proper documentation available, you will have a vague idea or even just an assumption of what the architecture looks like. You can use the integrated Axivion editor to create architectural sketches, which can then be directly and interactively mapped to the actual implementation, then checked and then adapted based on the insights gained. These steps can be iterated until the intended architecture is established as a basis for further development.
We call this Architecture Archaeology. This might take a bit longer than importing exiting fragments of an architecture as a starting point, but the result is the same: At the end of the process, a validated architecture is available again, which enables entry into the process of continuous architecture verification.
