The build-time software architecture view

Research and practice in the application of software architecture has reaffirmed the need to consider software systems from several distinct points of view. Previous work by P. Kruchten (1995) and C. Hofmeister et al. (2000) suggests that four or five points of view may be sufficient: the logical view (i.e., the domain object model), the (static) code view, the process/concurrency view, the deployment/execution view, plus scenarios and use-cases. We have found that some classes of software systems exhibit interesting and complex build-time properties that are not explicitly addressed by previous models. In this paper, we present the idea of build-time architectural views. We explain what they are, how to represent them, and how they fit into traditional models of software architecture. We present three case studies of software systems with interesting build-time architectural views, and show how modelling their build-time architectures can improve developer understanding of what the system is and how it is created. Finally, we introduce a new architectural style, the "code robot" that is often present in systems with interesting build-time views.