To successfully develop integrated Department of Defense (DoD) architectures with System Architect and the Activity Based Method, certain design and syntax rules need to be followed. Some of these are enforced by current functionality in System Architect. The rest are beyond the scope of System Architect to enforce and, therefore, it is up to architects themselves to use these rules to guide their architecture projects.

Design syntax rules have been developed to enable automation of various DoD Framework architecture entities and Framework products. While the rules restrict some of the features of System Architect, the larger goal of having consistent integrated architectures coming from different users and being able to combine and analyze these architectures within and across DoD agencies and services takes preference.