Views and Viewpoints in Software Systems Architecture

Abstract

Although the use of multiple views is a virtual holy grail of software and systems engineering, its status appears less secure in the field known as Software Architecture. Yet, practicing architects need views to manage the inherent complexity of the large, software-intensive systems they specify and build. This paper begins with a brief survey of the topic from its historical origins through current usage and issues, and ends with an overview of an approach to treating views as first-class entities within architectural description with respect to their usage in architectural specification, analysis and evolution. Keywords: architectural description, multiple views, viewpoints 1 Introduction The notion of multiple views has a long history in software engineering and related fields (such as requirements engineering, data engineering and systems engineering), where views are introduced to separate concerns and therefore to control descriptive complexity. Despite these precursors, thei..