Unstructured Architectures Considered Harmful
Abstract
The use of architectures to document and explore requirements during the systems engineering process is a valuable technique. Mature enterprise and system architectures can facilitate requirement discovery, analysis, and traceability in an effective and scalable manner. This role for architectures is important. However, an overemphasis of the requirements-architecture relationship risks an inadvertent devaluation of high-level design quality. Focusing on requirement capture may cause an architect to miss opportunities to make strategic engineering trade-off decisions, thereby creating an absence of design structure. This paper discusses design structure and its relationship with system complexity and warns of the pitfalls presented by unstructured architectures.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 03, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA566734
Entities
People
- Kevin B. Bush
Organizations
- Naval Information Warfare Systems Command