Enterprise Architecture at Work by Marc Lankhorst

Author:Marc Lankhorst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

7.1.1 Origin of Viewpoints

The concept of viewpoint is not new. For example, in the mid 1980s, Multiview (Wood-Harper et al. 1985) already introduced the notion of views. In fact, Multiview identified five viewpoints for the development of (computerised) information systems: Human Activity System, Information Modelling, Socio-Technical System, Human–Computer Interface, and the Technical System. During the same period in which Multiview was developed, the so-called CRIS Task Group of IFIP Working Group 8.1 developed similar notions, where stakeholder views were reconciled via appropriate ‘representations’. Special attention was paid to disagreement about which aspect (or perspective) was to dominate the system design (namely, ‘process’, ‘data’, or ‘behaviour’). As a precursor to the notion of concern, the CRIS Task Group identified several human roles involved in information system development, such as executive responsible, development coordinator, business analyst, business designer (Olle et al. 1988).

The use of viewpoints is not limited to the information systems community, it was also introduced by the software engineering community. In the 1990s, a substantial number of software engineering researchers worked on what was phrased as ‘the multiple perspectives problem’ (Finkelstein et al. 1992; Kotonya and Sommerville 1992; Nuseibeh 1994; Reeves et al. 1995). By this term, the authors referred to the problem of how to organise and guide (software) development in a setting with many actors, using diverse representation schemes, having diverse domain knowledge, and using different development strategies. A general framework has been developed in order to address the diverse issues related to this problem (Finkelstein et al. 1992; Kotonya and Sommerville 1992; Nuseibeh 1994). In this framework, a viewpoint combines the notion of actor, role, or agent in the development process with the idea of a perspective or view which an actor maintains. A viewpoint is more than a partial specification; in addition, it contains partial knowledge of how further to develop that partial specification. These early ideas on viewpoint-oriented software engineering have found their way into the IEEE 1471 standard for architecture description (IEEE Computer Society 2000) on which we have based our definitions below.

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