Software Architecture Tools- A Classification and Survey with Recommendation for an Organization

With the rise of cloud infrastructures, micro-services, frameworks, and reference architectures for every conceivable domain and quality attribute, someone might think that architectural knowledge is hardly needed anymore. But all the architect of today needs to select from the rich array of tools and infrastructure alternatives out there, instantiate, configure them, and create an architecture. Software architecture tools mean any software that helps automation and create architecture, according to requirements. The purpose of these tools is to reduce human effort, speed up software development, and increase reliability. This paper aims to perform a literature review of software architecture tools and to propose architectures for the requirements of the Organization of Small Industries and Industrial Towns of Iran (OSIITI). We surveyed more than 50 software architecture tools for use in practical situations and large-scale projects such as OSIITI’s needs. The results of this survey identified five classes, namely (a) Modeling Tools to model architectures; (b) Code-Based Tools (Diagrams-As-Code) to perform syntactic and semantic consistency checking of the models; (c) Automated Tools to generate executable source code automatically that implements the models; (d) Diagramming Tools and (e) Icons-Based Tools to support for trace links between models and requirements or models and tests interfaces. For each class, several software tools are provided with their major features. These classes and tools are very helpful for organizations such as OSIITI that want to develop software, in both small and large-scale projects. A couple of architectures, based on layered and service-oriented patterns are proposed for OSIITI.