Part II. Software Architecture Documentation in Practice

II Software Architecture Documentation in Practice

Part I laid the foundations for software architecture documentation by providing a repertoire of styles from which to choose and build views for a system; Part II presents information to complete the picture and to put the ideas into practice.

• Chapter 6 explores advanced documentation techniques that apply to many real systems: refinement and chunking of information, context diagrams, creating and documenting combined views, documenting variability and dynamism, and documenting a new style.
• Chapter 7 tells how to document the interfaces of architectural elements.
• Chapter 8 explores another advanced but essential technique: documenting the behavior of an element or an ensemble of elements.
• Chapter 9 provides detailed guidance for choosing the set of views to incorporate into a documentation suite, explores examples of sets of views, and gives two short examples for illustrating how to decide which views to use.
• Chapter 10 prescribes templates and detailed guidance for documenting views and documenting information that applies to more than one view.
• Chapter 11 examines other well-known prescriptions of software architecture documentation and places them in the context of the material in this book.