Diagramming the Ecosystem

The ecosystem of your system includes the environment in which your software lives, all the interfaces into your software, and all the external dependencies. Drawing a picture of the entire ecosystem gives you a map you can use in systematically exploring around connections and dependencies to discover risks associated with the parts of your system that are outside your software’s control.

The style of diagram I use to represent the ecosystem is a mashup of two traditional system analysis and design artifacts: a context diagram and a deployment diagram. A context diagram shows how your software connects to the world outside your system. It’s all about the interfaces, users, and connections to integrated systems. ...

Get Explore It! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.