Interest in software architecture as an area of research, education, and practice within software engineering has been growing steadily over the past decade. Software architecture is concerned with the principled study of large-grained software components, including their properties, relationships, and patterns of combination. It is becoming clear that one key to the effective development, operation, and evolution of software systems is the design and evaluation of appropriate architectures.As a complement to the Fourth Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-4), whose theme was software architecture, the Second International Software Architecture Workshop (ISAW-2) brought together practitioners and researchers for two intense days of discussion and work. The ISAW-2 proceedings [6] were published in the Joint Proceedings of the SIGSOFT '96 Workshops, ACM Press, ISBN 0-89791-867-3.The participants were organized into three parallel working groups each focused on a different topic within software architecture.• Styles and Patterns ---Techniques and models for centering software architecture activities on generally useful design methods, components, and assemblages of components.• Architecture Description ---Languages and methods for the capture of architectural designs.• Tools and Methods ---Automated aids for designing, evaluating, validating, implementing, and evolving software architectures.Tying these work groups together was the use of a common case study derived from a real-world architecture found in industry. Each working group studied this architecture from its particular perspective and, to a greater or lesser extent, used the case study to organize their discussions. It is interesting to note, for example, that the three groups created specialized depictions of the architecture for their discussion (see figures 6, 8, and 10).The case study was the architecture of the Call Center Customer Care (C4) System, which was developed by Andersen Consulting. A description of the architecture and some of its more interesting challenges appears in Section 2. It is reproduced here in the hopes that it might be prove of continued use to the community.Also appearing here are reports from each working group. The Styles and Patterns Working Group was led by Frances Paulisch, of Siemens, and Mary Shaw, of CMU. The group tried to uncover the styles and patterns that underlay various components of the C4 architecture. In the process, they defined a new kind of architectural style that they named the Data Ooze. The Architectural Description Working Group was led by Paul Clements, of the SEI, and Jeff Magee, of Imperial College. The group concentrated on identifying critical aspects of architectures that require description and on identifying important areas where further work in architectural description is needed. The Tools and Methods Working group was led by William Griswold, of UCSD, and Philippe Kruchten, of Rational. The group pretended to go through a development cycle for the C4 system in order to uncover various architectural tool and method needs.At the conclusion of the workshop, the working group chairs held a panel session in which each group asked a "challenge" question of the other two groups. The questions and responses appear in Section 5.2.We hope that these succeedings capture at least some essence of the very fruitful discussion that occurred at the workshop. Of course, this report cannot replace the benefits of actual attendance. The workshop will indeed continue, and we hope that the reader will be interested in attending a future ISAW.
Read more
4
