Designing, Documenting, and Evaluating Software Architecture

Part of any engineering discipline is the use of systematic, repeatable and traceable processes, methods and procedures. Software architecture is a branch of the discipline of software engineering. However, software architecture design, documentation and evaluation is still lacking a sound basis of systematic, repeatable and traceable procedures. At present software architecture is still more of an art open only to skilled and experienced experts rather than an engineering discipline open to the majority of software engineers. As software systems become more and more complex the importance of software architecture throughout the whole development cycle increases. Software architecture is not only a means to tackle complexity of large software systems but also a means to enable system qualities. Hence, it is becoming more and more important to include software architecture engineering into the software engineering discipline and the software development process. In this report we present systematic, repeatable and traceable methods of developing, documenting and evaluating software architectures in order to provide a basis for further research.