Abstract
In recent years architecture has acquired recognition as playing a pivotal role in change processes. Despite this recognition, describing architecture has proven to be difficult. Architecture frameworks have been defined to address this problem. However, there are many of them, and together they leave us with seemingly contradicting terminology. What are the underlying forces that caused people to create so many different frameworks? What do these frameworks teach us about the essence of architecting? Where do I start to select or create a framework for my current project? With these questions in mind we set out to perform a comparison of existing architecture frameworks. We ended up with a deeper understanding of the function of a framework, and “discovered” nine fundamental dimensions that seem to underlie architectural thinking. These “base dimensions” can be used to clarify the meaning of individual architecture documents independent of the framework they originate from, and they can be helpful in defining new architecture frameworks or situational architecture descriptions. In this paper we also relate our findings to IEEE 1471, which is another important generalisation of existing frameworks.
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Danny Greefhorst is a Senior IT Architect at IBM Business Consulting Services. His expertise lies in the area of enterprise application architecture, integration and development. Before joining IBM he worked as senior researcher for the Software Engineering Research Center. Danny has a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Utrecht.
Henk Koning has over 20 years practical experience in system development and architecture. This article is part of his Ph.D. study on “Communication of IT-architecture”.
Hans van Vliet is a Professor in Software Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit. His research interests include software architecture and software measurement. Before joining the Vrije Universiteit, he worked as a researcher at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (Amsterdam) and he spent a year as a visiting researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Hans has an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit and a Ph.D. in Computer Science form the University of Amsterdam.
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Greefhorst, D., Koning, H. & Vliet, H.v. The many faces of architectural descriptions. Inf Syst Front 8, 103–113 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-006-7975-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-006-7975-x