The ADOV Method: an Experience in Selecting the Relevant Views of an Architecture in a SME

Obtaining the appropriate architecture for a software system assures the long-term success of the product. Without a well defined and documented architecture is very hard or impossible to analyze and evaluate the quality of the product and the change impact. Thus it is very expensive to communicate to each stakeholder the information needed. Many existing approaches propose models based on a "closed" set of views to document architectures, such as "4+1" model, Siemens’ model, etcetera. Nevertheless, industrial practices in Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME) works informally, often even not documenting. From a practical experience where the 4+1 model was applied, it was noticed that there were views not proposed that were interesting, therefore a method was defined to select the views that really turn out useful to document in each case. To this end, the approach proposed by Clements et al [1] has been adapted.