System software - reference library?
A question for the ArchiMate brains trust:
As part of systems lifecycle management, I need to trace which upper-layer elements have a dependency on any given vendor-supported system, for example, where that support is expiring. I feel I'm not alone in this challenge.
It struck me that I could model this based on ArchiMate, and additionally, be able to do it in a reusable manner for other ArchiMate modellers. Would this be welcomed by the ArchiMate User Community?
I'm a little surprised this hasn't already emerged earlier and I wonder why, is there some legal or methodological impediment?
The basic features I am thinking of are:
- Use the Archi tool and the coArchi plug-in to bind somewhere into your Community Maintained Models;
- Start the model with System Software elements.
- "System Software" would have:
- a name reflecting the trade mark and version of the software; and
- a property, something like "End of service" -> "2021-05-11"
And if the above is broadly acceptable, then perhaps we can also add:
- Triggering Relationships to reflect evolution between software versions, or maybe even supported upgrade paths;
- Specialization Relationships to reflect the relationship between versions and their overall code bases;
- Realization Relationships to reflect that a system software version requires a limited variety of lower-layer configurations to operate and be supported.
In consideration of your "no commercial advertising" clause, I would steer away of any realization of logical components to physical components. I believe a lot of those classifications would be quite subjective and open to gaming by vendors, and not really relevant to lifecycle modelling anyway.
Alternatively, is this kind of ArchiMate-based analysis happening elsewhere, and where may I find it? Or is this just a big folly.
Thanks, Brendan