Abstract
Attempts to facilitate and streamline systems architecting have resulted in a great number of reusable principles, practices, mechanisms, frameworks, and tools. Such a practice is the use of architectural viewpoints and views. However, as systems change, these practices should also evolve. The increasing scale and complexity of systems resulting from an ever-growing pool of human needs and breakthroughs may lead, in some cases, to an increased gap between the abstraction activities attempting to capture the whole of a system, and the instantiation activities that produce concrete and detailed descriptions of a system’s architecture. To address this issue, this article introduces a new notion, that of architectural glimpse statements, fundamental questions acting as the building blocks for architectural views and products. This notion can help architects ask the right questions in the right manner to create fundamental statements, the elaboration on which can lead directly to concrete architectural products. Working on top of standardized and common approaches, the article introduces a language for the creation of architectural glimpse statements using the 5W1H maxim. Based on this language, a tool and guidelines are also provided to facilitate the usage of glimpses. Finally, the overall methodology is demonstrated in two case studies.
Highlights
Related WorkA great number of reusable principles, practices, mechanisms, and tools of identifying, representing, and materializing architectures have been produced
The resulting architectural glimpse statements are fundamental questions acting as the building blocks for architectural views and products
Architectural Views and other similar solutions can support architects and provide them a baseline for extracting Architecture Descriptions. These solutions follow a primarily top-down approach and are based on high-level constructs. These solutions either provide guidelines that are too open and do not offer many tools for architects to move from the definition of viewpoints to specific, concrete parts of architectural products, or suggest sets of architectural products that are too specific and hard to adapt or extend
Summary
A great number of reusable principles, practices, mechanisms, and tools of identifying, representing, and materializing architectures have been produced. Current architectures and AFs (like the ones presented in [10,11]) and ADLs (such as the ones introduced in [12,13]) are defined with varying degrees of rigour and offer varying levels of tool support These resources are mostly closed: their developers expect that each framework or ADL is all that an architect will ever need. Each view addresses a set of system concerns, following the conventions of its viewpoint, where a viewpoint is a specification that describes the notations, modeling, and analysis techniques to use in a view that expresses the architecture in question from the perspective of a given set of stakeholders and their concerns. In [19], the Reference Architecture for Modeling Space Systems (RAMSS) extends the RM-ODP and identifies more than 20 different views based on viewpoint specifications, expressed in terms of “objects”. Sometimes, viewpoints may be deemed to be too conceptual, and the guidelines to extract final results and products from them may be insufficient, especially when very complex systems are considered
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