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Documenting Software Architecture: Documenting Interfaces

June 2002 Technical Note
Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, Paul C. Clements, David Garlan, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord, Judith A. Stafford

This report provides guidance for documenting the interfaces to software elements.

Publisher:

Software Engineering Institute

CMU/SEI Report Number

CMU/SEI-2002-TN-015

Abstract

This is the fourth in a series of SEI reports on documenting software architectures. This report details guidance for documenting the interfaces to software elements. It prescribes a standard organization (template) for recording semantic as well as syntactic information about an interface. Stakeholders of interface documentation are enumerated, available notations for specifying interfaces are described, and three examples are provided.