Documenting Software Architectures: Recommendations for Industrial Practice

An important issue for software system development is the documentation of architecture designs. In this report, we describe techniques for the architectural documentation of software-based systems in the context of development processes that use UML for software design. The architectural documentation is organized in four kinds of views: problem domain view, code view, run-time view and deployment view. We examine JavaPhoneTM as a case study to illustrate the approach: what kinds of information are provided in each kind of view, what forms of notation should be used, what are their limitations, and what uses can be made of this documentation.