Universal Architecture Description Framework

Currently software architecting commonly follows a pattern that is sufficiently different from the systems and hardware architecting pattern of work that it is unnecessarily difficult for management and system engineering people as well as hardware and software people to understand and correlate the two processes. This can lead to a frustrated acceptance on the part of management and systems people that the software people know what they are doing and can be left alone motivated by an inability to understand their methods. Obviously, the whole of the system must be brought under an effective integration optimization, and management influence, not just the hardware aspects, especially since the hardware component is a decreasing subset in terms of cost and complexity. It is possible to reorder the software development pattern slightly to encourage improved hardware-software integration and management visibility while simultaneously improving the software development process. A model is emerging from research and work activity that promises to supply system and software engineers with a complete model that will be comprehensively effective in transforming a problem space defined by a user community into a precise definition of the problem and solution spaces at the system level as well as throughout the lower tier levels, no matter the physical entities that the system solution will be composed of, including hardware, software, people and procedures, and facilities. In that there is no established name for the aggregate entity, the title Universal Architecting Description Framework has been selected to stretch across the application of the models in an integrated fashion as it could be applied on an unprecedented development program today. This paper offers one form combining unified modeling language (UML), system modeling language (SysML), and four artifacts from traditional structured analysis (TSA). Other UADF are possible and the author has covered two others in a new book by this title. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 12: 91-116, 2009