Chapter: Software Architectures : Documenting the Architecture
Documentation across Views
Documentation across Views
We now
turn to the complement of view documentation, which is capturing the
information that applies to more than one view or to the documentation package
as a whole. Cross-view documentation consists of just three major aspects,
which we can summarize as how-what-why:
1.
How the
documentation is laid out and organized so that a stakeholder of the architecture can find the information
he or she needs efficiently and reliably. This part consists of a view catalog
and a view template.
2.
What the
architecture is. Here, the information that remains to be captured beyond the views themselves is a short
system overview to ground any reader as to the purpose of the system; the way
the views are related to each other; a list of elements and where they appear;
and a glossary that applies to the entire architecture.
3.
Why the
architecture is the way it is: the context for the system, external constraints that have been imposed to
shape the architecture in certain ways, and the rationale for coarse-grained
large-scale decisions.
Figure
9.3 summarizes these
points.
Figure 9.3. Summary of cross-view documentation
Related Topics