The many aspects of an IT-architecture

An IT-architecture can be viewed as a high-level design that supports and restricts the construction of IT-systems of a given type. Starting from a list of general requirements, this paper gives an overview of the dimensions of such a design. In addition, the various, often contradicting, architectural views that are relevant for the various stakeholders are discussed. Special emphasis is given to the modeling of the system behavior and the related timing and dependability constraints. Although, these issues are discussed in an object-oriented context, the underlying principles hold for other modeling techniques as well.