Documentation Principles and Practices That You Can Live with

Abstract

Software architecture has become a widely-accepted conceptual basis for the development of non-trivial software in all application areas and by organizations of all sizes. Effectively documenting an architecture is as important as crafting it; if the architecture is not understood, or worse, misunderstood, it cannot meet its goals as the unifying vision for software development. Development-based architecture strategies, such as Rational’s Unified Process, stop short of prescribing documentation standards. The Views and Beyond approach to software architecture provides practical guidance on the what, why, and how of creating IEEE 1471-2000 compliant documentation for your software architecture that will be used for years to come. The approach is based on the well-known concept of views and is presented in the context of prevailing prescriptive models for architecture, including the Unified Process and UML 2.0, which has improved support for representing key architectural elements over its predecessors.