UML Profile for Framework Architectures, The

7.7. Framelets as an aid to framework design

Before introducing the concept of framelets, it is useful to make a distinction between architecture and design. There is general agreement in the software engineering community that an architecture is a description of the set of objects in a software system in terms of their external signatures (usually, their interfaces) and their mutual relationships (Bass et al., 1998). There is less agreement over what constitutes a design. Sometimes design is simply seen as the process that results in an architecture; sometimes it is regarded as identical to the architecture. Here, we will use the term 'design' to signify the organization of the software at the purely abstract level, where the focus of attention ...