arc42 Architecture Documentation
Details
- Full Name
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arc42 Architecture Documentation Template
Core Concepts:
- 12 standardized sections
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From introduction to glossary
- Section 1
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Introduction and Goals
- Section 2
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Constraints
- Section 3
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Context and Scope
- Section 4
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Solution Strategy
- Section 5
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Building Block View
- Section 6
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Runtime View
- Section 7
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Deployment View
- Section 8
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Crosscutting Concepts
- Section 9
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Architecture Decisions (ADRs)
- Section 10
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Quality Requirements
- Section 11
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Risks and Technical Debt
- Section 12
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Glossary
- Pragmatic documentation
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Document only what’s necessary
- Multiple formats
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AsciiDoc, Markdown, Confluence, etc.
- Key Proponents
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Gernot Starke, Peter Hruschka
When to Use:
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Medium to large software projects
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When stakeholder communication is critical
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Long-lived systems requiring maintainability
Current Status:
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The current release is template version 9.0 (July 2025); the 12-section structure has been stable for many years — v9’s main change splits Section 10 into a quality-requirements overview (10.1) and detailed scenarios (10.2)
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What evolves is the material around the skeleton: help texts, translations, the tips-and-examples site docs.arc42.org, and the arc42 quality model (Q42) — a prior trained on v7/v8 material knows the section structure correctly but misses the Section-10 split and Q42