Architectural Blueprints: The 4+1 View Model of Software Architecture
This provides a foundational framework for software architects and developers to manage and communicate system designs, addressing a broad need in software engineering.
The paper tackles the problem of describing software architecture for complex systems by introducing the 4+1 view model, which uses multiple concurrent views to address stakeholder concerns and separate functional and non-functional requirements, resulting in a structured approach to architectural documentation.
This article presents a model for describing the architecture of software-intensive systems, based on the use of multiple, concurrent views. This use of multiple views allows to address separately the concerns of the various stakeholders of the architecture: end-user, developers, systems engineers, project managers, etc., and to handle separately the functional and non functional requirements. Each of the five views is described, together with a notation to capture it. The views are designed using an architecture-centered, scenario-driven, iterative development process.