Model-Based System Architecture, 2nd Edition

11Perspectives, Viewpoints and Views in System Architecture

11.1 Introduction

The system architect and other architecture stakeholders like to see appropriate architecture views that describe the architecture of the system-of-interest. Views to address different stakeholder concerns are a well-established concept, as already discussed in Chapter 8. For example, let's look at Kruchten's “4 + 1 View Model” [147]: It addresses the problem of architectural representation that overemphasizes certain aspects of development while neglecting others. The “” views are the logical view, the development view, the process view, the physical view, and the so-called scenarios,¹ which tie the elements of the other four views together. Kruchten's work was targeted at software architecture. Nevertheless, the notion of separating different stakeholders' concerns via different views also holds for system architecture, as we have seen in Chapter 8.

The term view is also known from Section 9.7, which is about the separation of view and model. A view in that sense is a general means of representing only as much of the available information as is practical. Thus, we have to distinguish views in general from the ones addressing a given stakeholder's concern. Since this chapter is about architecture stakeholders, we call the latter kind of views the architecture views. Their role in architecture descriptions ...