A Survey of Software Architecture Viewpoint Models

The documentation of software architecture is carried out in many different ways. One method is to break up the description into separate perspectives that address the different concerns that stakeholders have with software architecture. These perspectives, sometimes called viewpoints, can contain multiple diagrams to describe the complete system. Various models have been proposed that detail viewpoints and specify the stakeholders and concerns that they will satisfy. In this paper we survey five viewpoint models to determine the extent to which they cover the software architecture domain. We attempt to identify a set of viewpoints from different models can be combined to provide the widest possible coverage. We found that no model has complete coverage, but an optimal set of viewpoints can be selected from the models. This optimal set, whilst not providing complete coverage, has a greater coverage than any of the individual viewpoint models.