Documenting Software Architecture: Documenting Behavior

Abstract : This report represents another milestone of a work in progress: a comprehensive handbook on how to produce high-quality documentation for software architectures. The handbook, tentatively titled Documenting Software Architectures, will be published in early 2002 by Addison-Wesley as part of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Series on Software Engineering. The book is intended to address a lack of language-independent guidance about how to capture an architecture in a written form that can provide a unified design vision to all of the stakeholders on a development project. A central precept of the book is that documenting an architecture entails two essential steps: 1) documenting the set of relevant views of that architecture and then completing the picture by 2) documenting information that transcends any single view. The book's audience is the community of practicing architects, apprentice architects, and developers who receive architectural documentation. This technical note describes ways to document an important but often overlooked aspect of software architecture: the behavior of systems, subsystems, and components.