Software Architecture Description Revisited

Many languages for modeling various aspects of software systems’ architectures have been proposed over the past three decades. In the late 1990s, we provided the first systematic foundation for understanding, classifying, and comparing the quickly emerging architecture description languages (ADLs). This culminated in a 2000 IEEE TSE publication, which has subsequently been referenced widely. In this paper, we revisit the 2000 framework, consider how it influenced a foundational study of the suitability of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as an ADL and influenced the development of an extensible ADL (xADL) with a set of highly innovative features. We show how further work with modeling efforts led to a new and deeper understanding of software architecture itself. We conclude by analyzing a series of recent developments that have reshaped the software architecture landscape, posing new questions about the nature of architecture description.