A note on object-oriented software architecting

Abstract

There is currently an enormous interest in the concept of software architecture, largely induced by the concept of architectural patterns first introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 1979; Alexander et. al, 1977). We feel that some of the earlier work on software and system architectures has not benefited sufficiently from a deeper understanding of the complexity of the act of architecting in its home discipline: the built environment. This has lead to a confusion between fine-grain constructional mechanisms and techniques, and the overall, coarse-grain, software architectures that should in some way reflect original problem domains.