Architecture Documentation, Views and Beyond (V&B) Approach

Because architectures are intellectual constructs of enduring and long-lived importance, communicating an architecture to its stakeholders becomes as important a job as creating it in the first place. If the architecture cannot be understood so that others can build systems from it, analyze it, maintain it, and learn from it, then the effort put into crafting it will by and large have been wasted.

Researchers at the SEI and the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science set out to answer the question: "How should you document an architecture so that others can successfully use it, maintain it, and build a system from it?" The result of that work is an approach we call "Views and Beyond" or "V&B".

A view is a representation of a set of system elements and the relations associated with them. Views are representations of the many system structures that are present simultaneously in software systems. The basic principle of V&B is that documenting a software architecture involves documenting the relevant views, and then documenting the information that applies to more than one view. V&B includes a method for choosing the relevant views based on the structures that are inherent in the software architecture and on the needs and concerns of the architecture documentation's stakeholders. It shows how to document views, and how to document the information that applies across views. It also covers practical information such as how to judiciously combine views to avoid documentation overload, and how to document well-known architectural constructs using UML.

Download Now! You can download the template for a software architecture document based on the Views and Beyond approach.

Additional Information

Read More:

• Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond, by Paul Clements, Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, David Garlan, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord, and Judith Stafford

• Paul Clements, Comparing the SEI's Views and Beyond Approach for Documenting Software Architectures with ANSI-IEEE 1471-2000 (CMU/SEI-2005-TN-017).

• Judith A. Stafford, Creating and Using Software Architecture Documentation Using Web-Based Tool Support (CMU/SEI-2004-TN-037).

• Paul Clements, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord, Judith Stafford, Documenting Software Architectures in an Agile World (CMU/SEI-2003-TN-023).

• Additional representation and documentation reports

Template: Download a Microsoft Word template for a Views and Beyond software architecture document.

Podcast: Talk on documenting software architectures by Paul Clements (12.5 minutes, .wav file)

Tutorial: How to Represent the Architecture of Your Enterprise Application Using UML 2.0 and More
Paulo Merson, JavaOne Online Technical Sessions, May 2006.

Products and Services: Learn about V&B and architecture representation and documentation related products and services.

Contact Information: For technical details about V&B, contact Paul Clements.

Working with the SEI: Learn more about working with the SEI in software architecture.