Architecture for Software Construction by Unrelated Developers

Suppose one COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) software supplier provides an interpreter for a problem oriented language, another provides an application generator for producing numerical solvers for a class of partial differential equations, and a third produces a visualization package. A team of domain specialists writes scripts in the problem oriented language to define cases to be solved, uses the application generator to produce an appropriate solver, solves the generated PDE, and uses the visualization package to analyze the results and adjust the description of cases. Such examples illustrate that large and long lived software systems can result from the combined effort by various unrelated development organizations, organizations not even known to one another. No single design authority, to which the others report, has overall system responsibility. Such examples also illustrate the importance for software architecture to include relationships between entities that exist and are used during the construction process, instead of focusing only on relationships between entities that exist at runtime. The needs for software architecture for such systems are not well met by the existing literature.