Evaluating Simple Dependency Diagrams in Industry

The research and practice on designing and analyzing software architectures has evolved considerably during the past decade. In particular, more precise architecture modeling methods have reached industrial practice. Despite this, simple dependency diagrams are still widely used ease communication with non-technical stakeholders, to reduce need for domain knowledge, and to make initial design before detailed architecture phase. Based on our experience, seasoned architects can easily find potential architectural problems in these descriptions. In this paper, we describe a representative set of potentially problematic structures in dependency diagrams to raise relevant questions on the decisions made to create the software architecture.