Approaches for describing reference architectures: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

Reference architectures have emerged as an important arti-fact of software engineering, since they provide knowledge and experi-ence about how to design architectures of software systems in a specificdomain, favoring their reuse, and standardization. Describing referencearchitectures still is a great challenge, since knowledge about the domainand the concrete architectures should be described and documented in acoherent, cohesive, unambiguous, and complete way. However, referencearchitectures practical use is difficult due mainly to problems in their de-scriptions. The main goal is evaluate existing approaches for describingRAs, analyzing six key aspects while describing RAs: type, adherence toISO/IEC 42010, applicability, maturity, interoperability, and dynamism.For this, we conducted a systematic mapping and identified 21 primarystudies with approaches to describe reference architectures. We evaluated21 approaches to describe RAs, of which four approaches (S4, S7, S16,S17) adhered to at least half of the ISO/IEC standard, six (S3, S4, S5, S7,S8, and S19) achieved a medium technological readiness level, one (S4)adopted a standard to achieve interoperability among systems, and onlyone (S8) considered the dynamism in the description of RA. We highlightthe need to propose methods for describing RAs, considering the guidesand tools to support the description of RAs.