ABSTRACT
Introduction: The Status of Software Architecting Software is rapidly becoming the centerpiece of complex system design, in the sense that an increasing fraction of system performance and complexity is captured in software, and that software considerations drive overall system development. Software is increasingly the portion of the system that enables the unique behavioral characteristics of the system. Competitive developers of end-user system products nd themselves increasingly developing software, even though the system combines both hardware and software. The reasons stem from software’s ability to create intelligent behavior and quickly to accommodate technical-economic trends in hardware development. This capability of software is matched against increasing maturity in many other elds containing complex systems. As examples, the physical architectures of aircraft have been slowly varying since 1970, and the physical architectures of spacecraft have been slowly varying since at least 1990.
