Create Initial Software Architecture Assignment

1 About This Sprint

This sprint reviews how to describe a non-trivial software system in the form of a software architecture.

As a software designer I want to be able to divide my design into manageable chunks so that I can get a better overview.
As a software designer I want to address the quality requirements of the software system early on so that they are not missed.
As a software designer I want to address the quality requirements of the software system in the most appropriate way to facilitate the rest of the development project.

C. Larman, Applying UML and Patterns, 3rd Edition, Chapters:
1. Architecture Analysis
2. Logical Architecture Refinement
3. UML Deployment and Component Diagrams
4. Documenting Architecture: UML & the N+1 View Model

L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman. Software Architecture in Practice, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading MA, 2012.
C. Hofmeister, R. Nord, and D. Soni. Applied Software Architecture. Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 2000.
R. Kazman, L. Bass, M. Webb, and G. Abowd. SAAM: A method for analyzing the properties of software architectures. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Software engineering, pages 81–90. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1994.
P.B. Kruchten, “The 4+ 1 view model of architecture.” IEEE software 12.6 (1995): 42-50.
M. Lindvall, R. T. Tvedt, and P. Costa. An empirically-based process for software architecture evaluation. Empirical Software Engineering, 8:83–108, 2003.
M. Svahnberg and F. Mårtensson. Six years of evaluating software architectures in student projects. Journal of Systems & Software, 80(11):1893–1901, 2007.

Create an initial software architecture for your system.

Tasks:

Which quality attributes are relevant for your system?
Based on what you currently know, structure your system into different modules that have high coherence and low coupling.
- Try to think about localising specific areas of functionality into separate modules.
Do you need to model your system from different viewpoints (e.g. modules, threads and processes, data flow)?
- If so, create a model for each viewpoint.
- Make sure your viewpoints are consistent with each other.
- If you do not need several viewpoints, then why not?
Motivate and reason about what traits in your system makes it require or not require specific viewpoints.

Document Structure:

The title for this Assignment Document is: Initial Software Architecture for System <system name>

The assignment document shall contain the following items:

Title Page, according to the Title Page Instructions (Link)
System Description

A brief description (2-3 paragraphs) of your interpretation of what the goal of the system is.

Quality Attributes Discuss quality attributes that are important for your system. Motivate why.
Viewpoints Discuss your choices of viewpoints.
Viewpoints
- Create one section for each of your viewpoints.
- Model your system from the perspective of the viewpoint in a suitable notation (tip: You may find the UML Package notation useful)
- Describe the entities in your model. Remember that associations between entities also carry meaning in an architecture model and needs to be explained.
- Describe which particular design concerns that you are addressing with the help of the viewpoint.

Commit and push this document to your project repository.

Conditions of Satisfaction: When marking this part of the assignment we are looking for the following:

Does the title page contain a table with authors and author contribution?
Size of assignment: Is the system described from at least one and preferrably two to three viewpoints?
Size of assignment: Does each viewpoint contain 5-15 entities?
Are important quality attributes described and motivated?
Are the viewpoints motivated? Is there a reasoning about why or why not certain viewpoints are needed?
Is there a legend for each viewpoint that describes the types of entities and connections?
Are the entities and connections in each viewpoint described?
Does each viewpoint/entity have high cohesion and low coupling?
Is there a described strategy for how classes are allocated to different modules/entities?
IS this strategy followed?

You are done with this sprint when:

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