Documentação e validação de arquiteturas de software: uma proposta concreta.

Abstract

Software architectures provide the system context, guide the development process, assist the communication among stakeholders, increase reuse and help integrate with legacy and third party software and reduce maintenance and evolution costs; however, creating, documenting and validating architectures are not trivial tasks. The lack of examples and straightforward methods also makes accomplishing these activities more difficult. We present a document template and a method for validating software architectures. Software architectures for two different real systems were designed and one of them was validated using the proposed method. The results indicate that the document template accelerates the documentation process and guides junior architects by containing the necessary sections to be filled out; the template also ensures that important topics are mentioned and forces the architect to follow a methodology to document the architecture. Results show that the validation method increased the confidence in the designed architecture. The process was relatively simple due to the existence of a well-defined flow, and the resulting artifacts ensured that the validation was well documented by keeping a memory of what was done.