Building European software architecture community: how far have we come?

Abstract

Whilst the references to the role and importance of software architecture started appearing since 1969 when NATO organized a conference on software engineering techniques, the term “software architecture” started gaining acceptance by the software engineering community in early 1990s. In 1992, Perry and Wolf [9] provided an earlier framework for grounding software architecture as an important area of research and practice. A few years later in 1996, Shaw and Garlan [11] published one of the first books on software architecture. Less than a year later, Bass et al. [2] published a practiceoriented book on software architecture. Whilst these efforts play a significant role in promoting software architecture as discipline of research and practice, the foundations of this discipline included seminal work of Edsger Dijkstra, David Parnas, and others between 1960s and 1980s [8]. There was also an increasing realization that an architectural description can play an important role in successfully understanding and managing large and complex software systems [3]. The need