Improving the IEEE std 1471-2000 for Communication among Stakeholders and Early Design Decisions

There are, at least, three reasons why software architecture is important: a) communication among stakeholders, b) early design decisions, and c) transferable abstraction of a system. The IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems introduces and integrates stakeholders, concerns, viewpoints, views, and architectural models facilitating the expression, communication, evaluation, and comparison of architectures in a consistent manner. However, the standard does not specify a delivery format for architectural description. In addition, it is difficult to know if an architecture is within the principles of design imposed by a specific concern. A similar effort, to describe software architectures is the creation and improvement of special-purpose languages, known as architecture description languages (ADLs). However, ADLs have the disadvantage of not providing adequate support for separating several kinds of concerns across different viewpoints. In order to alleviate these issues, our paper proposes an enhancement to the conceptual model introduced in the standard. Our enhanced model, improves two of the reasons mentioned: a) communication among stakeholders and b) early design decisions