System architecture induces document architecture

Abstract

The documentation of an architecture is as important as the architecture itself. Tasked with communicating the structure and behaviour of a system and its constituent components to various stakeholders, the documentation is not trivial to produce. It becomes even harder in open, modular systems where components can be replaced and reused in each progressive build. How should documentation for such systems be produced and how can it be made to easily evolve along with the system it describes? We propose that there is a close mapping between the system architecture and its documentation. We describe a relational model for the architecture of open systems, paying close attention to the property that certain components can be reused or replaced. We then use ideas from storytelling and a discourse theory called Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to propose a narrative-based approach to architecture documentation; giving both a generic narrative template for component descriptions and a RST-based relational model for the document architecture. We show how the two models (system and documentation) map onto each other and use this mapping to demonstrate how document fragments can be stored, automatically extracted and collated to closely reflect the system’s architecture.

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