Software Architect's Handbook

Help the software architect

Documenting a software architecture helps the software architect. Software architects will be asked plenty of questions about the architecture by a variety of stakeholders and the documentation can help to answer them. It supports software architects to fulfill some of their responsibilities by providing artifacts with which to communicate the architecture to others, assist the development team, educate team members, review the software architecture, and pass on architectural knowledge for reuse.

Some projects are rather complex and it can be difficult to remember all of the structures that make up the architecture and how they interact with each other, even for the software architect who was directly involved. ...