Methods for Software Architecture Documentation

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.

SEI Method for Architecture Documentation

The SEI has developed the following method for documenting software architectures:

• The SEI's Views and Beyond (V&B) Approach holds that documenting a software architecture is a matter of choosing a set of relevant views of the architecture, documenting each of those views, and then documenting information that applies to more than one view or to the set of views as a whole.

  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.

Other Methods for Architecture Documentation

• ISO/IEC 42010 / IEEE 1471: Architectural Description
• Rational Unified Process (RUP) 4+1 View
• Architectural Perspectives

Do you have another architecture documentation method that should be added to this page? Let us know.