The many faces of architectural descriptions
Information Systems Frontiers
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The software architecture of a system describes how it is decomposed into components, how these components are interconnected, and how they communicate and interact with each other and with the environment. Software architecture represents critical, system-wide design decisions which affect quality, reconfigurability and reuse, and the cost for development and maintenance. In order to understand architecture as it is practised in the real world, we conducted a survey of a variety of industrial software systems. Our survey revealed the need for rigorous descriptions, systematic techniques, and well-defined processes to make architecture-level software development an engineering practice rather than an art.