Researching Reference Architectures and Their Relationship with Frameworks, Methods, Techniques, and Tools
Gerrit Müller, Piërre van de Laar · Insight · 2010
Reference architectures are seen as one of the means to cope with increased organization size, distributed development, increased integration, increased performance and functionality, and ever faster changes in the market.Our research project Darwin is aimed at evolvability of product families, where reference architecture is one of the research subjects.In this paper we start with positioning reference architectures relative to architecture frameworks, architecting methods and techniques, and tools.Then we focus on our attempts to mine information from past architectures by studying produced artefacts as well as by interacting with the people involved.We explain that it is a long way from detailed facts found in the artefacts to conceptual diagrams that capture the domain essence and that could guide future architectural developments.We illustrate this by discussing two of the smaller research projects in some more detail.