6.6 Summary

Architecture representation is crucial to a modernization effort. Each incremental release must have both an as-is and a to-be architecture that guide the development effort.

Architecture representation can be used for education, communication, and analysis. Each of these uses affects the selection of views and granularity. Specific guidance in the choice of views includes

• Understanding what uses will be made of your representation and choosing the views appropriately.

• Creating at least one module view, one component-and-connector view, one deployment view, and also context diagrams showing the interaction of the system with its environment.

• Creating behavioral models when runtime behavior is a key element in representing and analyzing the system architecture.

• Being clear about the mapping between views whenever constructing a hybrid view. To test for clarity, ask someone not involved in generating the hybrid view to explain all the mappings to you.