Applying the IEEE 1471-2000 Recommended Practice to a Software

Applying the IEEE 1471-2000 Recommended Practice to a Software Integration

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is a professional organization of engineers, scientists, and associated professionals whose interests are in the fields of electrical and computer science, engineering, and allied fields. The organization is anchored in 10 geographic regions; includes 36 professional societies and four technical councils; and coordinates 298 IEEE sections, 1,188 chapters, and 1,032 student branches as part of its outreach mission. IEEE was formed in 1963 from a merger of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). It is the world's largest professional organization, with more than 350,000 members in 150 countries.

The initials IEEE are probably best known to computer and technology enthusiasts due to the fact that the association is responsible for producing and documenting standards for hardware The IEEE has also been instrumental in the development of other standards, such as those used by Bluetooth technology, which allows cellular phones, computers, and other technologies to communicate wirelessly.

IEEE 1471, Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems has been in active use since 2000. Its original design goals were set forth in. If Google hits are any indication, IEEE 1471 has met several of its original goals: 1. to establish a frame of reference of terms and concepts for architectural description; 2. to codify best practices for the architectural description of software-intensive systems; and 3. to serve as one basis for evolution of thinking in the field. In March 2006, IEEE 1471 was adopted by ISO as an international standard. ISO and IEEE will jointly revise the standard as ISO/IEC 42010 with the new title, Systems and Software Engineering—Architectural Description.

The software sector is developing rapidly. New areas of practice and research are created with an increasing speed. Each claims to be critical to the success of software: Web technologies, security, software processes, or, as in our case, software architecture. There is clearly a compromise between profit-making business difficult in the relatively short term and invest time in researching new techniques and practices to solve.

To raise awareness of new concepts and techniques, it is not enough for the research, publish results, the researchers also active practitioners encounter in their current situation. We believe that standards and recommended practices is an important means to bridge this gap between research and practice. There are standards a company to be aware about the products it produces (such as network protocols or programming languages).

There is also a class of standards named “recommended practices”, which describe good work practices that are believed to yield high quality products in a cost-effective manner. Recommended practices are aimed at practitioners, but to our experience “recommended practices” are not used as much as they deserve. With this paper we would like to increase the interest for recommended practices in general and the IEEE Standard 1471-2000 in particular, by describing an application of the latter. In doing this, we address the ...