Software Engineering Institute

This report represents a milestone of a work in progress. That work is a comprehensive handbook on how to produce high-quality documentation for software architectures. The handbook, tentatively entitled Documenting Software Architectures, will be published in early 2002 by Addison Wesley Longman as part of the SEI Series on Software Engineering. Since this report is a snapshot of current work, the material described here may change before the handbook is published. 

The theme of the report is that documenting an architecture entails documenting the set of relevant views of that architecture, and then completing the picture by documenting information that transcends any single view. The audience for Documenting Software Architectures is the community of practicing architects, apprentice architects, and developers who receive architectural documentation.