Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers

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 SEI 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.

PDF [322 KB]

Authors

Felix Bachmann

Len Bass

Jeromy Carriere

Paul C. Clements

David Garlan

James Ivers

Robert Nord

Reed Little

This report is related to the following area(s) of work:

Software Architecture

Special Report
CMU/SEI-2000-SR-004
March 2000

Cite This Report

SEI:

Bachmann, Felix; Bass, Len; Carriere, S.; Clements, Paul; Garlan, David; Ivers, James; Nord, Robert; & Little, M.. Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers (CMU/SEI-2000-SR-004). Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2000. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00sr004.cfm

IEEE:

F. Bachmann, L. Bass, S. Carriere, P. Clements, D. Garlan, J. Ivers, R. Nord, and M. Little, "Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers," Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Special Report CMU/SEI-2000-SR-004, 2000. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00sr004.cfm

APA:

Bachmann, F., Bass, L., Carriere, S., Clements, P., Garlan, D., Ivers, J., Nord, R., & Little, M. (2000). Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers (CMU/SEI-2000-SR-004). Retrieved May 25, 2013, from the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University website: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00sr004.cfm

CHI:

Bachmann, Felix, Len Bass, S. Carriere, Paul Clements, David Garlan, James Ivers, Robert Nord, and M. Little. Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers (CMU/SEI-2000-SR-004). Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2000. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00sr004.cfm

MLA:

Bachmann, F., Bass, L., Carriere, S., Clements, P., Garlan, D., Ivers, J., Nord, R., & Little, M. 2000. Software Architecture Documentation in Practice: Documenting Architectural Layers (Technical Report CMU/SEI-2000-SR-004). Pittsburgh: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00sr004.cfm

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