Dr. Gernot Starke
Benjamin Wolf
Dieser Blogpost ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar
The approach of visualizing essential information on a specific topic in a highly structured way on a single sheet of paper has been made popular by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur with their “Business Model Canvas” (BMC).
The BMC book has sold millions of copies and is considered a classic for modern companies and startups.
We see one reason for this success in the reduction to an absolute minimum of information:
The BMC simply leaves no room for detailed or sprawling documentation.
You need to focus on the essentials.
Since the BMC in 2010, a number of other canvas models have been added, such as the “Lean UX Canvas”, the “Product Design Canvas”, or the “Bounded Context Canvas”, which is helpful for fans of Domain-driven Design (see below).
What is a Canvas?
We asked ChatGPG, and got the following answer:
In software engineering, a “canvas” typically refers to a visual container or surface where users can interact and manipulate elements or components to create or modify content..
This explanation is correct, but it rather refers to UI frameworks (like Tkinter, wxPython, HTML5, Java2D, JavaFX or WPF) that use a canvas as drawing surface.
In our context, the word canvas has a slightly different meaning:
A canvas is a structured visualization that facilitates understanding and analysis of key elements of certain topics.
All clear, right? As we love brevity, here’s the definition in simplified form:
Canvas: ordered representation of key elements.
In other words, it is about essential information (aka “key elements”) on a topic.
This might concern a business model, as in the Business Model Canvas, or important information about a software architecture.
The concentration on essential elements is commonly known as abstraction or modelling – that is, the omission of unessential details.
Such models serve a specific purpose, and which elements a model emphasizes in each case depends exactly on that purpose.
Structured Summary
The idea of structured summaries is used in both education and business. We use a structured summary to collect essential facts on a topic. The following figure shows an example for Maine-Coon cats.
But let’s get back to software and IT. You can use structured summaries (aka canvas) for technical documentation.
Isn’t that what arc42 is for?!
But of course! You can use the arc42 template and fill it very sparingly.
However, in reality arc42 is mainly used as a document or wiki, which is way too cumbersome or too much effort for some teams and people.
We were often asked for “even shorter documentation” in projects, and worked together with various teams from different industries to refine their documentation and make it even more compact. But for a long time, we still recorded the results in the (classic) template. That works well in itself – but it is still not as compact as a canvas.
What those disciplines can do, we can also do in software architecture: present the essential highlights of a system in a structured way in a super-compact form – with the Architecture Communication Canvas.
As you’re used to from the arc42 template, this canvas is also available under a permissive open source license, so that you can use it in commercial and professional environments. The canvas itself, its documentation, and the related website https://canvas.arc42.org are maintained in a public GitHub repository.
Key elements of IT systems
To tru
