Part III. Building the Architecture Documentation

Parts I and II covered the kind of information that should appear in architecture documentation. Part I covered styles, with their attendant element and relation types, that architects can use to engineer views. Part II covered other critical information beyond elements and relations that should be documented.

Part III deals more directly with the care and feeding of the architecture documentation itself. Exactly how does an architect decide what views to put into an architecture document? How should the architecture document be organized, laid out, divided into sections, and packaged? How should it be reviewed for quality and fitness for stakeholder use?

These and other topics are the subject of Part III.

• Chapter 9 provides detailed guidance for choosing the set of views to incorporate into a documentation suite, explores examples of sets of views, and gives two short examples for illustrating how to decide which views to use.

• Chapter 10 prescribes templates and detailed guidance for documenting views and documenting information that applies to more than one view.

• Chapter 11 presents a step-by-step approach for reviewing an architecture document. The approach is focused on involving the appropriate stakeholders and asking questions directed at making sure the document satisfies their specific needs and concerns.