IEEE 1471 - Overview

Overview

IEEE 1471 is the short name for a standard formally known as ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000, Recommended Practice for Architecture Description of Software-Intensive Systems. Within IEEE parlance, this is a Recommended Practice, the least normative of the kinds of IEEE standards. In 2007 this standard was adopted by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 as ISO/IEC 42010:2007, Systems and Software Engineering -- Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems.

It has long been recognized that “architecture” has a strong influence over the life cycle of a system. However, until relatively recently, hardware issues have tended to dominate architectural thinking, and software aspects, when considered at all, were often the first to be compromised under the pressures of development. IEEE 1471 was created to provide a basis for thinking about the architecture of software-intensive systems.

IEEE 1471's contributions can be summarised as follows (in this list, items in italics are terms defined by and used in the standard):

• It provides definitions and a meta-model for the description of architecture
• It states that an architecture should address a system's stakeholders concerns
• It asserts that architecture descriptions are inherently multi-view, no single view adequately captures all stakeholder concerns
• It separates the notion of view from viewpoint, where a viewpoint identifies the set of concerns and the representations/modeling techniques, etc. used to describe the architecture to address those concerns and a view is the result of applying a viewpoint to a particular system.
• It establishes content requirements for architecture descriptions and the idea that a conforming architecture description has a 1-to-1 correspondence between its viewpoints and its views.
• It provides guidance for capturing architecture rationale and identifying inconsistencies/unresolved issues between the views within an architecture description

IEEE 1471-2000 provides informative annexes that relate the concepts in IEEE 1471 to architecture concepts in other standards, including RM-ODP and IEEE 12207.