Software architecture in industrial applications
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Software engineering
Constructing blueprints for enterprise IT architectures
Constructing blueprints for enterprise IT architectures
Communications of the ACM
Applied software architecture
UML distilled (2nd ed.): a brief guide to the standard object modeling language
UML distilled (2nd ed.): a brief guide to the standard object modeling language
Readability and computer documentation
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
Software engineering (2nd ed.): principles and practice
Software engineering (2nd ed.): principles and practice
Investigating information systems with action research
Communications of the AIS
Documentation for software engineers: what is needed to aid system understanding?
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Requirements Engineering: Processes and Techniques
Requirements Engineering: Processes and Techniques
Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond
Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond
The 4+1 View Model of Architecture
IEEE Software
Practical Rationale for Describing Software Architecture
WICSA 3 Proceedings of the IFIP 17th World Computer Congress - TC2 Stream / 3rd IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture: System Design, Development and Maintenance
Using the UML for architectural description
UML'99 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on The unified modeling language: beyond the standard
Capturing exploration to improve software architecture documentation
Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion Volume
Collaborative prioritization of architectural concerns
Journal of Systems and Software
Towards software architecture documents matching stakeholders' interests
ADNTIIC'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Advances in New Technologies, Interactive Interfaces and Communicability
Software architecture documentation for developers: a survey
ECSA'13 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Software Architecture
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Architectural designs are an important means to manage the development and deployment of information technology (IT). Much debate has been going on about a proper definition of architecture in IT and about how to describe it. In 2000, the IEEE Std 1471 proposed a model of an architecture description and its context, which has been greeted with a warm welcome by many professionals in IT, but has not been applied much yet. In this paper the distance between IEEE Std 1471 and current practice is investigated. We have studied four real-life architecture descriptions from the practice of a bank and consultancy firm. These documents propose strategic decisions about application portfolios and were compiled without reference to IEEE Std 1471. Our research questions were: which parts of the document are, in the perception of the authors of those documents, relevant to which concerns of stakeholders? And, does this `relevancy pattern' suggest an alternative organization in concern-related views? In other words, can the existing documents be (manually) re-engineered to IEEE Std 1471 documents? The answers to these questions enable authors to communicate more effectively to the stakeholders and can be input to future automated document generation.We found that the `relevancy pattern' is very scattered, and that an alternative organization is not evident. Most concerns are addressed by a relatively small, but each time very different, subset of the document. So re-engineering these documents to IEEE Std 1471 documents would incur an almost complete rewrite. Our research makes it very understandable that readers complain about too much information. Some stakeholders might well have difficulty finding the information of their interest.The authors of the architecture documents found this investigation a worthwhile exercise, one which they think could be developed further into an evaluation instrument for this type of documentation. Conversely, authors of architecture documents do well to make their stakeholders and their concerns explicit up front.