Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon

Documenting Software Architecture: Documenting Interfaces

Felix Bachmann
Len Bass
Paul Clements
David Garlan
James Ivers
Reed Little
Robert Nord
Judith Stafford

Technical Note
CMU/SEI-2002-TN-015

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This is the fourth in a series of SEI reports on documenting software architectures. This report details guidance for documenting the interfaces to software elements. It prescribes a standard organization (template) for recording semantic as well as syntactic information about an interface. Stakeholders of interface documentation are enumerated, available notations for specifying interfaces are described, and three examples are provided.