consisting of both human and computerised actors, that is purposely
designed. The practical perspective will take shape as a set of practical guidelines
that should aid architects in the selection (and definition) of architecture description
languages and approaches that are apt for a specific (communication) situation.
Architecture descriptions are used to communicate the architecture of a planned
or pre-existing system. This could be a system that is part of an enterprise, an
organisation, a business, an information system, a software system, or the hardware
infrastructure. The communication about the system and its architecture is likely to
take place between different stakeholders of that system.
In this book, the primary focus is on architectural models of a graphical (as
opposed to textual or verbal) nature. One may refer to these as architectural models
‘in the narrow sense’. In this chapter, however, we are concerned with architecture
descriptions in ‘the broader sense’. In other words, textual, verbal, or any other
types of architecture descriptions are included.
At present, many description languages are already available to architects, while
many more are being created by both academia and industry. Why all these
languages? How does one select the language that is most apt in a given situation?
Such questions beg for a well-conceived answer. In line with the old adage ‘practice
what you preach’, we argue that just as proper requirements engineering is needed
for the development of systems, proper requirements should also be formulated for
languages and approaches that are to used as vehicles for communication during
system development. In formulating these requirements,