Researching Reference Architectures

Abstract

Reference architectures are seen as one of the means to cope with increased organization size, distributed development, increased integration, increased performance and functionality, and ever faster changes in the market. Our research project Darwin is aimed at improving evolvability of product families, where reference architecture is one of the research subjects. In this chapter, we start with positioning reference architectures relative to system architectures and product family architectures, and architecture frameworks and architecting methods. Then we focus on generating reference architecture views by mining information from past architectures by studying produced artifacts as well as by interacting with the people involved. We explain that it is a long way from detailed facts found in the artifacts to conceptual diagrams that capture the domain essence and that could guide future architectural developments. We illustrate this by discussing two of the smaller research projects in some more detail.