2+2 Architectural Views for SAA of Business Information Systems

Architectural views play an important role in software architecture analysis (SAA). For SAA of flexibility, architectural views are used to determine the effect of change scenarios. These scenarios represent possible changes to which the system has to be adapted, and determining the effect of these changes provides insight into the system’s flexibility. Most approaches to SAA use a single architectural view to evaluate the effect of change scenarios. We found that the effect of change scenarios may span several such views, and so SAA of flexibility requires multiple views. Based on our experience with SAA, we have identified four architectural views for analyzing the effect of change scenarios. These views are introduced in this paper by elaborating the analysis of a large information system, which we performed for the Dutch Tax Department. In addition, we present some guidelines on how to use these views for analyzing the effect of a given change scenario.