A deployment activity model is automatically generated from a deployment topology model. The operations to automatically generate the deployment activity model may be visible or “under the covers.” Regardless of visibility, a deployment model tool traverses a representation (e.g., one or more data structures) of the one or more diagrams of the deployment topology model. The deployment model tool begins creating preliminary representations of a deployment activity model until representation of a valid deployment activity model is created. Although the preliminary representations (assuming the first traversal attempt of the deployment topology model is unsuccessful) are discarded in some embodiments, other embodiments store the representations of the preliminary representations for analysis (e.g., analysis for the tool to learn, analysis to discover values for automatically defining attributes, etc.).