Producing Software Architecture Documentation to Suit Your Needs

The Views and Beyond (V&B) approach to software architecture provides practical guidance on the what, why, and how of creating IEEE 1471-2000 compliant documentation for your software architecture that will be used for years to come. The approach is based on the well-known concept of views and is presented in the context of prevailing prescriptive models for architecture, including the unified process and UML 2.0, which has improved support for representing key architectural elements over its predecessors. In this paper, students will be introduced to the views and beyond approach and will gain hands-on experience creating a new architectural style using the V&B style guide and learn how to document an architectural view in that style using the V&B view template. This paper concludes with a discussion of tool support for architectural documentation and a demo of a Web-based documentation system.