Quickstart
Go from a new project to your first architecture review loop
This guide follows the shortest useful Archflow loop: create a project, model its important structure and behavior, review the evidence, and capture the conclusion.
1. Create Or Open A Project
Start from Projects and create a project or open one you can access. A project contains its architecture model, active version, analysis, decisions, documentation, history, and project-specific settings.
2. Add Systems And Relationships
Open Model → Systems and create the important architecture elements. Prefer names people use in conversation, such as “Checkout API” or “Orders Service”; keep source paths and package names in descriptions.
Add the intended dependencies under Model → Relationships. Record direction, interaction style, technology, and useful evidence rather than drawing an unexplained line.
3. Create A Focused View
Open Documentation → Views, create a view, and arrange only the elements needed to answer one architecture question.
4. Map Runtime Behavior
Use Model → Workflows to capture a critical business or technical flow. Workflows provide runtime evidence about which systems participate together.
Use Model → Behavior Model for events, commands, policies, read models, and their workflow links. Use Model → Capability Map when the review needs a business-outcome lens.
5. Review The Architecture
Open Analysis → Coupling to compare static dependencies with workflow co-activity. Use Blast Radius to investigate the impact of a failure or change, and Complexity to find dense or fragile areas.
Treat analysis as evidence for review, not an automatic verdict. Scope the analysis to the appropriate context, module, or leaf before drawing conclusions.
6. Review Decisions
Open Decisions to assess architecture concerns, documentation gaps, risks, technical debt, decision suggestions, and what-if proposals. Apply, acknowledge, reconcile, dismiss, or discuss each item according to its state and impact.
7. Capture Durable Context
Use Documentation → Documents for reusable narrative documents, Architecture Handbook for the structured architecture story, and Project Knowledge for source evidence, approved memories, and reviewed insights.
8. Save A Baseline
Use History → Versions before a significant experiment or redesign. A named version gives the team a baseline to compare and merge later.