Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers

Abstract

This report represents the first milestone of a work in progress. That work is a comprehensive handbook on how to produce high-quality documentation for software architectures. The handbook, tentatively entitled Software Architecture Documentation in Practice, will be published in mid- to late-2000 by Addison Wesley Longman as a book in the SE series on software engineering. Aimed squarely at the practitioner, the handbook is intended to fill a gap in the literature: There is a complete lack of language-independent guidance about how to actually capture an architecture in written form so that it can fulfill its purpose as a communication vehicle providing a unified design vision to all of the varied stakeholders of a development project. The theme of the work is that documenting an architecture entails documenting the set of relevant views of that architecture, and then completing the picture with documentation of information that transcends any single view. The report lays out our approach and organization for the complete book, and provides full guidance for one of the most commonly used architectural views: the layer diagram. The audience for this book is the community of practicing architects, apprentice architects, and developers who are on the receiving end of architectural documentation.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA377988

Entities

People

  • David Garlan
  • Felix H. Bachmann
  • James Ivers
  • Jeromy Carriere
  • Len Bass
  • Paul Clements
  • Reed Little
  • Robert Nord

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Traffic Control Systems
  • Application Software
  • Books
  • Commerce
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Engineering
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Handbooks
  • Language
  • Operating Systems
  • Performance Engineering
  • Programming Languages
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Virtual Machines

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering
  • History

Readers

  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Software Engineering.