Architecture description

An architecture description is a formal work product used to express the software architecture of a system, as defined by the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard (originally published as IEEE 1471). It’s the umbrella term the standard uses for any document, model, or set of architecture views produced to describe a system’s architecture to its stakeholders, and every other term the standard defines — element, viewpoint, correspondence — is a specialization of it.

The standard is deliberately notation-agnostic. An architecture description may be expressed informally, in prose and diagrams, or formally, using an architecture description language (ADL) — a dedicated notation such as SysML or ArchiMate designed specifically for expressing architectures unambiguously.

Where a description draws on more than one viewpoint, a correspondence records a relationship between elements described from different viewpoints, and a correspondence rule can enforce that such a relationship must hold.

References

• ISO/IEC/IEEE (2011). ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011 — Systems and software engineering — Architecture description.