Quantitative Observation and Theoretical Construction in Software Architecture

Classical science advances via the dance between quantitative observation and theoretical construction. It has been ten years since the first International Software Architecture Workshop, and since that time there has been a steady increase in the number of people who call themselves "software architect" and a similar growth in the value that organizations place in software architecture. It is a sign of maturity for any given engineering discipline when we can name, study, and apply the patterns relevant to that domain but, unfortunately, no such reference yet exists for software-intensive systems. We've architected and deployed many systems, but have studied their patterns of success and failure only a little; we've explored theoretical frameworks for describing software architectures and processes to build them, but we've done only a modest job in validating them in the real world. In this presentation, I'll summarize the things we know and the things we don’t know (and speculate on the things we don't know we know) about software architecture. I'll then examine an effort to create a handbook of software architecture to help fill this gap between observation and construction.