What Industry Needs from Architectural Languages: A Survey

Many times we are faced with the proliferation of definitions, concepts, languages and tools in certain (research) topics. But often there is a gap between what is provided by existing technologies, and what is needed by their users. The strengths, limitations and needs of the available technologies can be dubious. The same applies to software architectures, and specifically to languages designed to represent architectural models. Many different architectural languages have been introduced in the last two decades. However, it is unclear if they fulfill the user’s needs in architectural description. As a way to plan for next generation languages, this study analyzes practitioners’ perceived strengths, limitations and needs associated to existing languages for software architecture in industry. We run a survey by interviewing 48 practitioners from 40 different IT companies in 15 countries. Each participant is asked to fill in a questionnaire of 51 questions. By analyzing the data collected through this study, we have concluded that (a) whilst practitioners are generally satisfied with the design capabilities provided by the languages, they are dissatisfied with analysis features and the ability to define extra-functional properties; (b) architectural languages used in practice mostly originate from industry; (c) more formality and better usability are required.