SoftwareArchitecture < Transform

A survey of software architecture is provided by David Garlan, in SoftwareArchitectureARoadMap.

Garlan loosely defines architecture as a software system's gross organization as a collection of interacting components. He recognizes six aspects of software development where architecture can play an important role:

ProgramUnderstanding: software architecture simplifies our ability to comprehend large systems.
SoftwareReuse
Construction
SoftwareEvolution: software architecture can expose the dimensions along which a system is to evolve.
Analysis
Management

There is a whole lot to say about SoftwareArchitectureDefinitions!

Some of the text books on software architecture include (by year):

W. Pree. Design Patterns for Object-Oriented Software Development. Addison-Wesley, 1995.
M. Shaw and D. Garlan. Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Engineering Discipline. Prentice-Hall, 1996.
F. Buschmann, R. Meunier, H. Rohnert, P. Sommerlad, and M. Stal. Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture. Wiley, 1996.
L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman. Software Architecture in Practice. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
C. Hofmeister, R. Nord, and D. Soni. Applied Software Architecture. Addison-Wesley, 2000.
J. Bosch. Design and Use of Software Architectures. Addison-Welsey, 2000.
M. Jazayeri, A. Ran, and P. van der Linden. Software Architecture for Product Families: Putting Research into Practice. Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Resources include:

http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_design.html, containing lots of links
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/ata/ata_init.html, including an online bibliography and pointers to events.
http://www.serc.nl/people/florijn/interests/arch.html, a collection of resources maintained by Gert Florijn.
The Working IEEE / IFIP conference on software architecture (WICSA).
The Alberta Software Engineering Research Consortium has organized a workshop on software architectures: papers on line at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~kenw/conf/awsa2001/

Architecture Description Languages:

The SEI maintains a list at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/adl.html
Nenad Medvidovic, Richard N. Taylor, A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages. IEEE TSE, 26(1), 2000. http://www.computer.org/tse/ts2000/e0070abs.htm
Nenad Medvidovic, David S. Rosenblum, David F. Redmiles, and Jason E. Robbins. Modeling software architectures in UML. TOSEM 11(1):2-57, 2002.

Selected papers:

Mary Shaw's keynote at ICSE 2001 entitled The Coming-of-Age of Software Architecture Research: availabe at http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/vit/www/paper_abstracts/keynote01.html
The Four Plus One View Model Of Architecture.

Whether architecture is an adequate metaphor in software development is an issue of debate, which also requires a good understanding of the nature of traditional architecture.

See http://www.urban.uiuc.edu/Courses/Varkki/up326/manual/reference.htm for an interesting course on urban design containing relevant references and an approach that may be helpful for software development as well;
See Jaon Baragry's and Karl Reed's paper in WICSA 2001 for a thought provoking discussion on the validity of the architecture analogy.