Experiences Using Viewpoints for Information Systems Architecture: An Industrial Experience Report

There has recently been an increase in interest, among information systems architecture practitioners, in using viewpoints for architectural definition and description. This has been caused by a number of factors including the publication of IEEE standard 1471 and the increasing adoption of RUP (and its “4+1” viewpoint set). This short experience report outlines the experiences that two software architects have had in evaluating and applying a number of viewpoint sets to information systems development. The strengths and weaknesses found with each viewpoint set are described and some general observations on viewpoint set use and definition are presented. Introduction and Motivation As a practicing software architect, I am always interested in techniques that can help to manage the complexity of the architectural design process. Most architects would agree that architecture is a many-faceted discipline and developing a successful software architecture involves considering a lot of different system structures simultaneously. This means that using more than one model to capture your architecture is an intuitively appealing approach and many practicing architects do appear to do this informally. Certainly the software architecture research community appears to have decided that representing architectural designs via a number of related models (or “views”) is the only way to do it. Having said this, if we use a number of models to represent our architectural designs then we need some sort of framework to organize the work and its deliverables, so that the approach doesn’t become too unwieldy and disorganized to use. Some time ago, along with another colleague, I came across IEEE standard 1471 [5] (a standard for architectural description), which was then about to be published. It seemed obvious to us that the view and viewpoint based approach defined in the standard had the potential to help us organize the architectural design efforts of our clients and ourselves. We had also previously come across Phillippe Kruchten’s well known “4+1” viewpoint set [7] and we started to further investigate its application to our work.