Software Engineering Institute

Software architecture is a field of study enjoying unprecedented growth and interest. This report identifies a set of promising lines of research related to software architecture and architecture-based system development that are expected to lead to advances available soon to practitioners. Some of the goals of software architecture are enumerated, and the investigatory efforts are structured according to work in the design or selection and creation, representation, evaluation and analysis, utilization, or legacy recovery of software architectures. Promising research is described in each area. These opinions are correlated with those of other experts in the field. Finally, a timeline for achieving some of the predicted results is offered.