Many Faces of Software Architecture

One reason that hardware design is more systematic than software design is that hardware designers have reached agreements about the description levels for design artifacts. We hypothesize that quality and productivity in software development would be improved if software designers were to arrive at similar agreements. As a first step, we look at representations related to software architecture. Since software architecture is an emerging field, the research community has developed little consensus on the definition of architecture except that architecture describes the structure of a system as composed from its subcomponents, and the interactions among them. To help us identify pragmatic issues related to architecture, we have surveyed a variety of systems to understand their structure and their use. In our study, we observed that many systems have more than one structure addressing different concerns related to system construction, functional and non-functional characteristics, and the development environment. Based on these observations, we piopose several different representation levels for software architecture. We briefly describe issues arising from multiple representations of software.