State of the Art of Software Architecture Design Methods Used in Main Software Development Methodologies

Abstract

The design Software Architecture (SA) is an essential activity in the modern development software systems. This SA design activity defines its core components, the interrelationships among them, and a set of essential attributes expected for the final software. While this design is realized in a high level of abstraction, missing this activity or a wrong conduction of it will have negative effects in further software development phases, and lately in the final software. Thus, SA design methods are relevant to be studied and applied. In this article, we review the SA design methods that are (explicitly or implicitly) included in five well-known Software Development Methodologies (SDMs). We report: (1) a brief description of the five SDMs; (2) a substantial description of the SA design methods used in each SDM; and (3) a comparative analysis among them using an evaluation template posited by well-recognized experts in this topic. Our results suggest that SA design methods, while sharing a similar design purpose and some activities, they also present a varied structured and nomenclature.