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WICSA Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

A BoF session is a short, informal forum for discussions related to any aspect of software architecture. Attendees who want to get together with others who share their interests, goals, technologies, environments, or backgrounds are invited to organise and attend a BoF session.

BoFs can be proposed and advertised before the conference or can be convened at the conference when the need for one is recognised. BoFs can be used to continue a discussion that began in another session, for a group to get together to pursue a common interest or just to discuss a range of opinions around a topic.

BoF 1: Relations between Views

When: Tuesday, 19 February, 17:30 – 19:00
Wiki page: Relations between Views
Organizers:
Danny Weyns (Katholieke Universisteit Leuven, Belgium)
Nelis Boucké (Katholieke Universisteit Leuven, Belgium)
Rich Hilliard (independent consultant)

Defining suitable relationships between architectural views is an important challenge in documenting software architecture. Relations between views are important to achieve consistency across views that document different stakeholders' concerns. Consistency across views is vital for specifying an architectural documentation and managing its evolution over time.

Several researchers have studied the problem, however, there is little consensus how inter-view relations should be dealt with in architectural documentation. We are not aware of tools that help architects with specifying views and relations between views. In Software Systems Architecture, Rozanski & Woods give an extensive list of possible view relations, but the authors do not explain how the relations can be integrated in architectural documentation. In Documenting Software Architecture, Clements and colleagues describe an approach to describe documentation across views. In the ICSE paper, "ViewPoints: meaningful relationships are difficult!" of Nuseibeh, Kramer & Finkelstein reflect on consistency management by means of inter-ViewPoint rules that express the semantic relationships between ViewPoints. In our own research (Weyns and Boucké), we investigate the problem of interview relations. We defined an initial set of concrete relations, integrated them in xADL and ArchStudio, and applied them in several cases.

Recently, this subject gained increased attention with the introduction of view correspondences in the draft revision of ISO/IEC 42010 (Systems and Software Engineering — Architectural Description, i.e., the revision of IEEE 1471). With the inclusion of view relations in the new standard, it is particularly important to achieve a consensus that is both technically sound and useful to practitioners.

The goal of this BoF session is to bring together architects that share an interest in relations between views. The particular aim of the session would be to exchange ideas and discuss:

The BoF has a wiki page for coordination and discussion, before, during and after the session.
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