Landscapes explained
What is a landscape?
A landscape is a shared model and set of diagrams containing internal and external objects at varying levels of detail in your organization.
It also stores your flows, tags and tours. Consider a landscape to be the world that you work in, referencing everything that interacts with each-other in the real world - These should all be in 1 landscape.
When to split a landscape
The power of a landscape comes with the shared model, diagrams that can be drawn from the model and being able to push updates across the whole landscape. Because of this we recommend staying in 1 landscape as much as you can.
There are, however, a few reasons you may want to split out your landscapes. For example:
- There is clear separation of system abstractions and they rarely interact
- Regulatory reasons - keeping teams/people separate
- Separating customer specific designs to share with them
- Duplicating to "play" with the design or play with the features of IcePanel
Objects in separate landscapes are not linked in any way, so if you reference a system from another landscape, we recommend that you use the "External system" setting, so people know not to add the main details here. Updates will not be reflected if you edit these referenced objects.
Large or complex systems?
If you are finding that you are struggling to organize your model because of a large and complex architecture (i.e hundreds of apps/stores and many diagrams), we recommend using Domains to split out your systems into logical business areas.
These systems and child objects still remain in a single model, can be shared and synced from other domains, but it reduces the amount you seem on the diagrams and model view. This allows you to focus your conversations and sections of your model to business areas, logical system groupings, segregation of external and internal systems etc. with the reusability of a model.