A Social Organization Perspective on Software Architectures

This paper proposes a set of concepts for describing a software architecture as a social organization. This social structure consists of actors who have goals to fulfil and social dependencies describing their obligations. The framework is an adaptation of i* [17] proposed as a modeling language for early requirements. Based on this framework, the paper advocates architectural styles for software which adopt concepts from organization theory and strategic alliances literature. The styles are modeled in i* and formalized in terms of Telos metaconcepts. Each proposed style is evaluated with respect to a set of software quality attributes, such as predictability, adaptability and openness. The use of these styles is illustrated and contrasted with two examples of software architectures reported in the literature.