What are the major topics a good high-level architecture document should include?

Question

What are the major topics a good high-level architecture document should include?

Answer 1

You might want to look at IEEE 1471: Recommended Practice for Architecture Description of Software-Intensive Systems for one way of writing such documents.

Answer 2

The ReadySET project at Tigris has templates for a number of major software engineering documents, including architecture documents. Their architecture template might give you some good ideas on what to include.

Some ideas:

• architecture style
• UML component model
• textual descriptions of the components in the UML model
• UML deployment model
• textual descriptions of the deployment environments
• integration strategies
• communication between components
• evaluation of the architecture with respect to the goals

Whatever you include, it's important to keep the document up-to-date. An out-of-date document isn't useful to anyone.

Answer 3

Here you have an example of a RUP style Software Architecture Document:

http://www.ts.mah.se/RUP/wyliecollegeexample/courseregistrationproject/artifacts/analysisndesign/sadoc.htm

I used to have this as a base, but with modifications depending of the context and the type of application.