WICSA 2009 BAVF:Architecture Viewpoints and Frameworks

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This page was written around the time of WICSA 2009.

Birds-of-a-Feather Session

When: Monday, 14 September 2009, 18:00 – 19:00

Organizers: Patricia Lago (VU University Amsterdam), Paris Avgeriou (University of Groningen), Rich Hilliard

Participants (Tentative):

Please sign your name here if you are thinking of attending this BoF. (Click the signature button in the editor). Tell us something about your background. Add a few sentences about the working session topic such as your position, questions you would like to see discussed, etc.
  • --Bob Schwanke I am a practicing software architect and consultant, working for Siemens Corporate Research. My battle on every project is to find a form of architecture description that is cost-effective (worth doing), which seems to me to imly that it must be partially checkable for consistency with the implementation, and otherwise easy to maintain. These standards still seem to be beyond our reach.
  • --Rich Hilliard
  • --Qing Gu
  • --Samuil.Angelov 10:06, 13 September 2009 (EDT)
  • --Bartosz.Michalik 13:02, 13 September 2009 (EDT) I am a PhD student at Poznan University of Technology working on architecture evaluation and knowledge acquisition methods.
  • --Alin Stefanescu I am a researcher at SAP interested in service-oriented architectures and model-based testing. I'd like to participate in this BAVF to understand the current topics on viewpoints in the community. [Update: I arrived late at the hotel, so I cannot participate anymore...]
  • --David Emery I'm involved with the ISO/IEC 42010 standard, and drafted the current language on "architecture framework". A lot of my work has focused on understanding how to make architecture relevant, focusing on non-functional characteristics/attributes and stakeholders other than the software developer. See Image:Emery-hilliard-frameworks-14jun-emery.pdf
  • --Nelis DistriNet, KULeuven, Belgium. Particularly interested in domein specific viewpoints and how to go from a general specific repository to specialized viewpoints for a particular company.

Contents

Call for Participation

One of the original intents behind the Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems (ANSI/IEEE Std 1471 and ISO/IEC 42010) was to provide a basis by which the community could assemble a collection of viewpoints that can be reused across the industry.

This has a clear merit for practitioners: on the one hand architecture viewpoints are necessary for an effective architecture description but may be too expensive to create and update for every single project; on the other hand most projects have large commonalities with respect to the architectural concerns they must address, therefore reusable viewpoints could be easily applied after small customizations across different projects. Especially for small to medium-sized projects, reuse of architecture viewpoints is of paramount importance. The standard also envisioned architecture frameworks that collect one or more reusable viewpoints for a particular domain of application or community of stakeholders. In the on-going revision to the standard, architecture frameworks are being added as a new construct.

Similarly to other attempts at reuse in software engineering, the available collections of reusable architectural viewpoints are very limited. Documenting viewpoints or even frameworks has not yet become part of standard industrial practice. Organizations tend to adopt an existing framework (e.g., Kruchten's 4+1 view model, Rozanski and Woods, or SEI's Views and Beyond). There are only some sporadic attempts from the academic community to define reusable viewpoints but they are far from reaching a critical mass.

The goal of this BoF session is to bring together architects and academics to explore issues behind this problem as well as approaches to its resolution and will emphasize exploring existing industrial architecture viewpoints and frameworks. This BoF is a first step to raise awareness in industrial and academic circles and motivate both communities to contribute reusable viewpoints. We anticipate that having a common mechanism for defining viewpoints offers the prospect of "interoperation" across existing architecture frameworks, and the means to compose new frameworks by mixing and matching viewpoints.

Possible topics for discussion include but are not limited to:

  • What is the current state-of-the-practice in defining and reusing architecture viewpoints and frameworks in industry and academia?
  • Do we have "enough" viewpoints? Are there important architectural concerns that are not being addressed?
  • What are the issues in defining a catalog of reusable architecture viewpoints and frameworks?
  • Can we define a core template for codifying such reusable assets?
  • Are we ready to start a community of practice with this objective?
  • What lessons have we learned from defining viewpoints and from applying them?
  • How would you define a new framework by composing third-party viewpoints?

Notes from Session

Why care about architecture viewpoints?

Architecture viewpoints are "reusable assets". A viewpoint associates a set of architecture concerns (problem) with notations, models, techniques and heuristics for addressing those concerns (solution mechanisms). The point of a viewpoint is to give the Architect a starting point, so s/he does not have to reinvent the wheel for each new project.

An architecture framework is a coordinated set of viewpoints, for a domain of application or community of stakeholders with common concerns.

Do we have enough viewpoints?

  • Too many, it's hard to find what to use.

What viewpoints are missing?

  • Are we ready to standardize viewpoints or sets of viewpoints (frameworks)?
  • At least ready to standardize models that can be composed into viewpoints use of catalog intact? will people always need to customize? how far should viewpoints be extensible?
  • if we do 'standardization', how will we determine 'goodness'? Criteria??
  • Standardization and publicly available Viewpoint Catalog are two options.

Would a common template for documenting viewpoints (like the template of the Gang of 4 patterns book)?

What can we learn from the Patterns community about documentation? About community review practices?

Would it be useful to catalog viewpoints? Would people contribute? Would people use this resource?

  • viewpoint discovery (query language) and associated use cases need to be worked out for the viewpoint catalog
  • relations between viewpoints should be captured too
  • pragmatic question: how much do successful viewpoints depend on tool support?

IEEE Software Special Issue on Software Architecture: Framing Stakeholders' Concerns

Call for papers:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/swcfp6

Submissions due: 1 April 2010

Contributions

If you have relevant materials or references, please add here:

  • A template for documenting viewpoints. I've used this for a number of years, and recently updated to the draft ISO/IEC 42010. | viewpoint template example Rh
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