Describing software architecture with UML

The presence of a solid architectural vision is a key discriminator in the success or failure of a software project. This tutorial examines what software architecture is and what it is not. It discusses and illustrates how to describe architecture through a set of design viewpoints and views and how to express these views in UML (Rumbaugh et al., 1998), in the spirit of the new IEEE Standard: Recommended practice for architectural description. The tutorial shows of how architectures drive the development process and how to capture architectural design patterns using UML (Unified Modeling Language). It is illustrated by several widely applicable architectural patterns in different domains.