Using Architectural Perspectives

A crucial aspect of the software architect’s role is to ensure that a system based on their architecture will exhibit the quality properties (performance, security, availability and so on) that are important to their stakeholders. A proven approach to help guide an architect through the process of designing an architecture is to use architectural views, based on formal viewpoint definitions (such as those in the well known "4+1" set). However, a practical problem we have found when using existing viewpoint sets is the lack of guidance relating to system qualities (as opposed to system structures) that they provide. To address this problem, we identified a complimentary concept, called the architectural perspective [15], to provide an architect with practical guidance as to how to ensure that their system exhibits the right set of quality properties. This paper reviews the idea of the architectural perspective and relates a specific experience of applying them to the architectural definition of an enterprise integration project for a financial markets organisation, explaining the strengths and weaknesses we found in the approach.