IEEE 1471
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. This standard was recently accepted by ISO JTC1 as ISO/IEC DIS 25961. Within IEEE parlance, this is a Recommended Practice, the least normative of the kinds of IEEE standards.
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General Description
IEEE 1471 is the first formal standard for software architecture or system architecture. It focuses on the description of an architecture as the concrete artifact representing the abstraction that is software architecture or system architecture.
IEEE 1471's contributions lie in the following (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 exists to respond to specific stakeholder concerns about the software/system being described
- It asserts that architecture descriptions are inherently multi-view, no single view captures all stakeholder concerns about an architecture
- 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.
- It establishes that a conforming architecture description has a 1-to-1 correspondence between its viewpoints and its views.
- It provides for capturing rationale and inconsistencies/unresolved issues between the views within a single architecture description
The current standard provides informative annexes that relate the concepts in IEEE 1471 to architecture concepts in some other standards, including RM-ODP.
Outline of the Standard
Clauses
- Overview
- References
- Definitions
- Conceptual Framework
- Architectural Description Practices
Annexes
- Bibliography
- Notes on Terminology
- Examples of Viewpoints
- Relationships to Other Standards
All of formal normative requirements on conforming architecture descriptions are in Clause 5 of the standard.
Bibliographic Information
IEEE, IEEE Recommended Practice for Architecture Description of Software-Intensive Systems, IEEE Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems, E-ISBN 0-7381-2519-9, ISBN 0-7381-2518-0, IEEE ordering information
Update to the Standard
A revision to this standard commences in 2006, corresponding with comments received through the ISO ballot and the IEEE standard 5-year review of the standard.
Categories
IEEE standards | Software architecture