Title
Exploring Software Architecture Context
Abstract
Architecture description can be modeled as a set of alternative choices and decisions, where the rationale and tradeoffs for each decision are documented and understood as needed to inform subsequent decisions. Each decision, based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, pertains to one or more stakeholder concerns. These concerns combined with the system environment and scenarios provide architecture design context that clarifies the motivation for decisions. Subsequent authors have introduced the notion of an influencing decision force, using a many-to-many relationship with concern, to provide further context for decisions. For both concerns and forces it is left to the architect to identify the nature of this context. This paper proposes a systematic process for identifying and documenting design context in support of architectural decisions. For our work decision force is used as a central unifying aspect of the architecture framework metamodel. We extend the decision Forces Viewpoint to capture detailed design context descriptions, and add features for tagging the architecture description elements to facilitate identification of commonality, classification, and specialization. Initial feedback from industry stakeholders indicates this approach should be explored further.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/WICSA.2015.22
Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
software architecture, architecture descriptions, architecture viewpoints, architecture decisions
Applications architecture,Systems engineering,Software architecture description,Computer science,Solution architecture,Architecture framework,Reference architecture,Software architecture,Enterprise architecture framework,View model
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.42
6
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
K. Eric Harper1133.45
Jiang Zheng2111.43