Towards an architectural viewpoint for systems of software intensive systems

Abstract

An important aspect of architectural knowledge is the capture of software relationships [25]. But current definitions [25, 21, 23] do not adequately capture external system relationships [5], and offer no guidance on implicit relationships [29]. This leaves architects either unaware of critical relationships or, to 'roll their own' based on aggregations of code-level call structures, resulting in critical architectural gaps and communication problems within Systems of Software intensive Systems (S3) environments [2]. These environments may also restrict the sharing of architectural knowledge due to either legal, or contractual constraints, or overwhelm due to the size and number of involved systems adding to the challenges of identifying and describing the relationships. This paper presents a novel S3 Architectural Viewpoint consisting of; 1) an extensible taxonomy of relationships (building on existing relationship concepts), 2) a systematic, repeatable technique to detect both immediate and composite relationships, and 3) proposes the Annotated Design Structure Matrix to link S3 views, with existing dependency analysis technique. The goal is an architectural approach for sharing and analysis of architectural knowledge relating to relationships, in an S3 environment. The research is ongoing and validation will be performed through case studies from industry collaborations.