Reverse Architecting: seeking the architectonic

This is a position paper that aims to introduce a novel perspective that we hope will motivate a discussion in a direction useful for reverse-architecting efforts. This paper is fundamentally a philosophical think-piece that tries to draw the attention of the software engineering community to a deeper, and we argue is more useful, view of software architecture. This paper adopts a fresh look at the activities of software architecting and re-architecting. It is suggested that looking at software architecture at a level that transcends the components and connectors concerns, and into the categoric differentiation of types of constructional elements is more beneficial for the evolvability and adaptability concerns of software. This view, which is termed "software architectonics\´ is proposed as a focus for software re-architecting activities. The views presented herein are grounded in various readings of the Architecture proper and urban morphology disciplines.