Leveraging Software Architectures through the ISO/IEC 42010 standard: A Feasibility Study

The state of the practice in enterprise and software architecture learnt that relevant architectural aspects should be illustrated in multiple views, targeting the various concerns of different stakeholders. This has been expressed a.o. in the ISO/IEC 42010 Standard on architecture descriptions. In the same vein, the research community observed that Architecture Description Languages, or ADLs, should be developed to address stakeholders' concerns concentrating on the use of viewpoints for their description. This notwithstanding, we notice today a proliferation of ADLs impervious to these guidelines. This imperviousness creates a gap between what the IT industry requires and what ADLs can provide. This gap makes it impossible for practitioners to choose and use the best-fit ADL for his/her requirements. To fill this gap, we must analyze the existing ADLs, and mine and make explicit their addressed concerns, views, viewpoints, and stakeholders. Such an explicit overview can provide practitioners with pragmatic information for selecting the most suitable ADL, and hence support them in the architecting process. This paper reports on initial results in this direction. Given a specific ADL (namely, DARWIN/FSP), it presents a feasibility study on the methodology mapping the concepts of the ISO/IEC 42010 on the DARWIN/FSP ADL. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.