Recommended practice for architecture description Sample Clauses

Recommended practice for architecture description. In defining our architecture we largely follow the methodology as described in ISO/IEEE 1471-2000, “Recommended Practice for Architecture Description of Software-Intensive Systems” [2], here just called IEEE 1471. In IEEE 1471, architecture is defined as the fundamental organisation of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution. IEEE 1471 provides definitions and a meta-model for the description of an architecture. Figure 1 provides the key concepts in the context of an architecture for a particular system and an associated architectural description. From IEEE 1471 follows that an architecture should address a system's stakeholders’ concerns, and that architecture descriptions are inherently multi-view. A view is defined as a representation of a whole system from the perspective of a related set of concerns. In essence, IEEE 1471 states that no single view adequately captures all stakeholders’ concerns. Therefore, before designing an architecture, the stakeholders and their concerns should be known first. This knowledge is best obtained by identifying the relevant use cases, as we have already done in [1]. Another important aspect of an architecture is the context, or the environment. The context determines the setting and circumstances that have influence on the system. The context can include other systems that interact with the system of interest, either directly via interfaces or indirectly in other ways. In this case the boundaries are given by the in-home environment and the residential networks.