Software Architecture

Book excerpt: For more and more systems, software has moved from a peripheral to a central role, replacing mechanical parts and hardware and giving the product a competitive edge. Consequences of this trend are an increase in: the size of software systems, the variability in software artifacts, and the importance of software in achieving the system-level properties. Software architecture provides the necessary abstractions for managing the resulting complexity. We here introduce the Third Working IEEFlIFIP Conference on Software Architecture, WICSA3. That it is already the third such conference is in itself a clear indication that software architecture continues to be an important topic in industrial software development and in software engineering research. However, becoming an established field does not mean that software architecture provides less opportunity for innovation and new directions. On the contrary, one can identify a number of interesting trends within software architecture research. The first trend is that the role of the software architecture in all phases of software development is more explicitly recognized. Whereas initially software architecture was primarily associated with the architecture design phase, we now see that the software architecture is treated explicitly during development, product derivation in software product lines, at run-time, and during system evolution. Software architecture as an artifact has been decoupled from a particular lifecycle phase.