Software Architect's Handbook

Software architecture views

Many software systems are complex, making them difficult to understand. This is particularly true when one attempts to look at the whole system at once. Architecture views are used to ease understanding, as each one focuses on a specific structure or structures of the architecture. This allows a software architect to document and communicate only a small piece of the architecture at a time. Having multiple views represent an architecture allows the software architect to communicate it in a manageable way.

Deciding which views to create depends on the goals of the documentation and the audience. In the Uses of software architecture documentation section earlier in this chapter, we covered some of the reasons that ...