Architecture as a Shared Hallucination

Abstract

This paper present the architecture of a software intensive system. An architecture is just a collective hunch, a shared hallucination, an assertion by a set of stakeholders about the nature of their observable world, be it a world that is or a world as they wish it to be. An architecture therefore serves as a means of anchoring an extended set of stakeholders to a common vision of that world, a vision around which they may rally, to which they are led, and for which they work collectively to make manifest. When I say that an architecture is a shared hallucination, I mean that an architecture-as-artifact is a naming of the mutually agreed-upon set of design decisions that shape a software-intensive system. While an architecture is just an abstraction of reality, an architecture-as-artifact is a declaration of that shared reality. In this way, that shared hallucination represents a common vision among a set of stakeholders as observed simultaneously through several different points of view and represented by a set of interlocking models.