The basic idea of ARCADIA/Capella is to describe how a system works. An Architectural Diagram is in my Opinion one of the most powerful techniques to do this. From my experience, there is no better way to explain to e.g. a colleague how a system works as to show him the Architectural Diagram.
Describing the system (e.g. a Software Program, Mechanical System) is obviously possible using Capella.
However, is it also feasible to describe the development of such a system?
The screenshot I’ve posted shows the workflow of our development. The LAB diagram was incredibly important for us, as it allowed us to assign the individual subtasks to the appropriate colleagues so that they had an overview of the entire system at all times. Once a task was finished, we moved on to the next task, again assigning the individual subtasks to the respective employees.
My question now would be, whether our procedure for the development of a system, corresponds to the “rules” of ARCADIA/Capella, or whether there would be other/better procedures.
Note: A huge advantage of the LAB was of course that each subtask could be described in more detail in its own LAB.
ARCADIA concepts and activities can indeed be used to describe and reason about the development of the system. At least, I’ve already seen some experiences on this.
In fact, the Operational Analysis perspective is often used to describe and analyze business processes. If we consider the specific case of a development process, we are in the use case you describe.
Also this is not that surprising: the method supports the architecting of systems. It has been created for a specific kind of systems (human-made, “engineered” systems), but many principles and activities can be applied to other kinds of systems (human systems, for instance).
Having said that, IMHO Arcadia lacks of concepts, tasks and views that are particulairly useful when modelling human processes. The main one being the planning of activities on time or roadmaps. Of course you can exploit some existing concepts (functions, dependencies between functions, …) but ultimately you lack of a roadmap-kind view.
Thank you for your answer! This encourages me to continue using Capella as a tool for Developing Systems. It’s true that there is no “time” component in e.g. Architectural Diagrams, but that’s not a big disadvantage for our use case. As I said, the most important thing is, that it allows us to create subtasks and to define an Architectural Diagram for each subtask.
I had some thoughts about this… thinking as well about documentations (EI) used through business processes…
Business processes would be then capabilities. I did not complete the reflexion, but time planning would go through export csv function list and capabilities list, use in Excel or other spreadsheet. Then prepare to import into time planner like MS-Project.
To me the Capella part would be the business process design, run the process would be more in the planner.
