Architecture Description

Architecture descriptions provide substantial benefit for maintenance and evolution of systems. Architecture descriptions shall document how selected solutions satisfy requirements or address concerns. Architecture starts to exist as initial solution hypothesis while analyzing and validating business and stakeholder requirements. System architects will analyze the identified stakeholders and their concerns to establish appropriate communications. Architecture descriptions comprise of four major architecture description elements: architecture viewpoints defining how to communicate, architecture views depicting the architecture, architecture decisions tracing the evolution of architecture, and architecture rationales justifying architecture decisions. Model-based approaches are very often limited to certain domains or disciplines. A comprehensive architecture model needs to support documentation in a rather extensive way. Viewpoints working group fosters for a methodical approach in defining architecture viewpoints enabling generation of architecture views for the many stakeholders of model-based systems engineering.