Model-Centric Approach to Software Design and Stakeholder-Specific Architecture Views in Scope of a Financial Institution

Abstract

This paper presents a model-centric approach to software architecture & design in the scope of a large financial institution. One challenge in large organizations is the creation, aggregation and dissemination of architecture and design specifications by multiple stakeholders and outsourcing partners, at different times during the lifecycle of a software application. Lacking a common design language and format, the submission of manually written reports is common, which in turn facilitates redundancies in content and causes specifications at large to become cluttered, inconsistent and difficult to maintain. Manually written reports also tend to focus designers on producing nicely arranged diagrams and prosaic description, rather than on applying sound principles of software engineering. In turn, such specifications frustrate their subsequent use for coding, effectively rendering the design effort questionable. The approach presented defines a model-centric approach to enable different architecture views, based on models maintained by a team of designers. Employing a single-source concept, the same models serve the purpose of software design, coding and stakeholder-specific reports.