The Golden Age of Software Architecture: A Comprehensive Survey

This retrospective on nearly two decades of software architecture research examines the maturation of the software architecture research area by tracing the evolution of research questions and results through their maturation cycle. We show how early qualitative results set the stage for later precision, formality, and automation, how results have built up over time, and how the research results have moved into practice. *Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213 Mary Shaw’s work is supported by the Software Industry Center, the A.J. Perlis Chair of Computer Science, and the National Science Foundation under Grant CCF-0438929. The Software Engineering Institute is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the sponsoring organizations.