Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

22 Achieving Consistency Across Views

The use of views addresses one of the biggest challenges you face as an architect: to represent a large and complex system in a way your stakeholders can understand. A view is a way to portray those aspects or elements of the architecture that are relevant to the concerns the view intends to address—and, by implication, the stakeholders for whom those views are important.

Without views, you end up with a single, all-encompassing model that tries (and usually fails) to illustrate all of the aspects of your system. Such a model is complex, uses a mix of notations, and is too hard for anyone to understand—never mind appreciate the subtleties, nuances, and implications of your architectural choices.

However, ...