Actor

As explained in Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure

An actor is a person, group, or system whose actions can contribute to achieving a business goal.

An actor is a person, group, role, software system, or other entity whose actions participate in a domain process or story. Modeling actors makes responsibility and interaction visible across socio-technical workflows. section 8.4.1 section 8.5.1

Use actors to distinguish who or what performs an activity or initiates a process step:

• Represent people or the roles they fulfill, such as a salesperson or legal team. section 8.4.1
• Represent software systems or applications when they issue commands, produce events, or participate in interactions. section 8.4.1 section 8.5.1
• Connect an actor to activities, work items, and other actors to show how a domain process unfolds. section 8.5.1

Approval and prescription workflows

In a contract-approval workflow, a salesperson requests approval, the contracts system raises an event, and software instructs the approvals system to request legal approval. In a prescription workflow, a customer places an order and uploads a prescription; a validation service contacts a doctor and confirms the result with the orders system. section 8.4.1 section 8.5.1

Figure 8.10 The five basic notation elements of the Domain Storytelling pictographic language

Compare the actor symbol with work items, activities, sequence numbers, annotations, and groups in the Domain Storytelling pictographic language. section 8.5.1

How Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure covers it

How deep it goes

Defines actor notation and demonstrates interactions, but stops short of implementation details or formal behavioral specifications.

Examples

Uses salespeople, legal teams, customers, doctors, contracts systems, approval systems, and prescription services in workflow models.

What it assumes

Starts from people, software systems, and other entities playing roles, without requiring specialized implementation knowledge.

What you can do after

Apply it via EventStorming and Domain Storytelling to model responsibilities, interactions, and process sequences.

How it connects

Connects actors with roles, systems, commands, domain events, policies, work items, activities, sequence numbers, annotations, and groups.

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Also explained in

• 

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  BDD in Action, Second EditionAn actor is a person, system, or process that interacts with the system under test and pursues goals through activities and abilities.
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  Akka in Action, Second EditionAn actor is an independent computational entity in the actor model that encapsulates state and behavior and communicates through asynchronous messages.
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  Functional Design and Architecture: Examples in HaskellA concurrent actor is an independent computational entity that receives requests, updates private state, and produces responses or effects.
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  Functional Programming in Scala, Second EditionAn actor is a computational component that communicates through asynchronous messages and processes them according to its internal state.
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  liveBookmanning.com
  Object-Oriented Software Design in C++An actor is a person, external system, or other entity that interacts with an application in a use case.
• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Software Design for Python ProgrammersAn actor is a person, system, or other entity that interacts with an application through a use case.

Compare how 7 books explain actor →

Related concepts

• message passinguses · A communication or computation technique in which entities exchange messages to transmit or propagate information, coordinate work, or update state.
• Actix Webimplemented by · Actix Web is a Rust web framework for building asynchronous HTTP servers, web applications, and services.
• Akkaused by · Akka is an open-source toolkit for building concurrent, distributed, and resilient applications on the JVM using actor-based abstractions.
• concurrencykind of · Concurrency is the structuring or execution of multiple computational activities so their progress overlaps in time, whether or not they run simultaneously.
• concurrency primitivekind of · A concurrency primitive is a fundamental mechanism, construct, or protocol for coordinating concurrent execution and controlling access to shared state or resources.
• distributed systempart of · A distributed system is a computing system whose components run across multiple networked processes or machines and coordinate through communication.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.