ANSI/IEEE 1471 and systems engineering

ANSI/IEEE Standard 1471-2000 is the Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of SoftwareIntensive Systems, developed by the IEEE’s Architecture Working Group (AWG) under the sponsorship of the Software Engineering Standards Committee of IEEE. ANSI/IEEE 1471 is the first formal standard to address the content and organization of architectural descriptions. The standard defines the structure and content of an architectural description (AD) and incorporates a broad consensus on best practices for such descriptions. Although ANSI/IEEE 1471 was conceived as a software-focused standard, this paper argues that it is equally applicable to any system; hence appropriate for use as a part of systems engineering to describe system architectures. This article reviews the concepts of ANSI/IEEE 1471, the rationale for their selection, and demonstrates its application in systems engineering. • Penultimate draft of paper to appear in Systems Engineering: the Journal of the International Council on Systems Engineering. 1 A wide variety of architecture frameworks exist as de-facto standards in particular communities, but ANSI/IEEE 1471 is the first formal standard in the sense of being a product formally approved by a recognized standards body. ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORKS The notion of architecture has entered into both the domains of software and systems engineering in recent decades. There are several threads to this entry. Many invoke a direct analogy with the notion in civil engineering, while others are built on particular practices largely drawn from the information technology industry. Some background on what problems are being addressed by what goes by the term “architecture” is helpful in understand the motivation for the ANSI/IEEE 1471 work and related frameworks. There are two system development scenarios most commonly associated with a need for an architectural approach. These are not the only scenarios, but are the most common. In the first, the potential sponsor of a system development engages in a period of concept exploration before making a decision to go forward with development. At the end of the concept exploration phase the sponsor may decide to go forward and begin searching for suppliers,