Software is a directed multigraph (and so is software process)

Abstract

For a software system, its architecture is typically defined as the fundamental organization of the system incorporated by its components, their relationships to one another and their environment, and the principles governing their design. If contributed to by the artifacts coresponding to engineering processes that govern the system's evolution, the definition gets natually extended into the architecture of software and software process. Obviously, as long as there were no software systems, managing their architecture was no problem at all; when there were only small systems, managing their architecture became a mild problem; and now we have gigantic software systems, and managing their architecture has become an equally gigantic problem (to paraphrase Edsger Dijkstra). In this paper we propose a simple, yet we believe effective, model for organizing architecture of software systems. First of all we postulate that only a hollistic approach that supports continuous integration and verification for all software and software process architectural artifacts is the one worth taking. Next we indicate a graph-based model that not only allows collecting and maintaining the architectural knowledge in respect to both software and software process, but allows to conveniently create various quantitive metric to asses their respective quality or maturity. Such model is actually independent of the development methodologies that are currently in-use, that is it could well be applied for projects managed in an adaptive, as well as in a formal approach. Eventually we argue that the model could actually be implemented by already existing tools, in particular graph databases are a convenient implementation of architectural repository.