IT:AD:Documentation:SAD:RaW:Example:1:04 Architectural Views

The Rozanski and Woods View/Viewpoint document structure describes the complexity of the solution's systems by describing in a series of curated views, prepared from the point of view – the viewpoint – of key stakeholders.

A description of the standard architectural views are as follows:

• System Context View: the relationships, dependencies, and interactions between the system and its environment (the people, systems, and external entities with which it interacts). Includes the system’s runtime context and its scope and requirements.
• System Functional View: the system’s functional elements, their responsibilities, interfaces, and primary interactions; drives the shape of other system structures such as the information structure, concurrency structure, deployment structure, and so on.
• System Information View: the way that the architecture stores, manipulates, manages, and distributes information. This viewpoint develops a complete but high-level view of static data structure and information flow to answer the big questions around content, structure, ownership, latency, references, and data migration.
• System Concurrency View: the concurrency structure of the system and maps functional elements to concurrency units to clearly identify the parts of the system that can execute concurrently and how this is coordinated and controlled.
• System Development View: the architecture that supports the software development process. Development views communicate the aspects of the architecture of interest to those stakeholders involved in building, testing, maintaining, and enhancing the system.
• System Deployment View: the environment into which the system will be deployed, and the dependencies the system has on its runtime environment. Deployment views capture the system’s hardware environment, technical environment requirements, and the mapping of the software to hardware elements.
• System Operational View: how the system will be operated, administered, and supported when it is running in its production environment, by identifying system-wide strategy.