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This section provides a narrative description of the major sections of this document and the overall contents of each. Readers seeking specific information can use this section to help them locate it more quickly.
The organization of the Software Architecture Documentation is modeled after that described by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond [Clements 2003; see Referenced Materials section]. The so-called V&B approach comprises descriptions of a set of relevant views of architecture along with information that applies to more than one view or to the set of views as a whole. It is consistent with the IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems [IEEE 2000; Referenced Materials], keeping in mind the desire to be all-inclusive as well as minimalistic.
This document is organized into the following sections:
- Executive Summary: Contains a high-level overview of the system and its architecture designed primarily for the executive or less technical reader, providing a high-level understanding of the goals of the project and the most important architectural features
- Document Roadmap (this section): Provides a roadmap and overview for this document. Every reader who wishes to find information relevant to the software architecture should begin by reading the Roadmap, which describes how the document is organized, how stakeholders are expected to use it, and where information may be found. The Roadmap also provides information about the views that are used by this document to communicate the software architecture
- Architecture Background: Explains why the architecture is what it is. It provides a system overview, establishing the context and goals for the architecture development. It describes the background and rationale for the software architecture, explains the constraints and influences that led to the current architecture, and describes the major architectural approaches that have been utilized in the architecture. It also includes information about evaluation or validation performed on the architecture to provide assurance it meets its goals.
- Architecture Views: Specifies the software architecture. Views specific elements of software and the relationships between them. A view is a representation of one or more structures present in the software. This document comprises a multi-view approach of the architecture. However, unlike the prescribed set of views advocated by models such as the "4+1 View Model" [Kruchten 1995; see Referenced Materials section], it follows a more modern trend of selecting the most useful views to describe the system at hand. As with much of the architectural documentation of successful open source projects, these views concentrate on components-and-connectors diagrams and sequence diagrams.
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