View Model - History

History

In the 1970s, methods began to appear in software engineering for modeling with multiple views. Ross and Schoman (1977) introduce the constructs context, viewpoint, and vantage point to organize the modeling process in systems requirements definition. According to Ross and Schoman, a viewpoint "makes clear what aspects are considered relevant to achieving ... the overall purpose " and determines How do we look at ? As examples of viewpoints, the paper offers: Technical, Operational and Economic viewpoints.

In 1992, Finkelstein et al., published a very important paper on viewpoints. In that work: "A viewpoint can be thought of as a combination of the idea of a “actor”, “knowledge source”, “role” or “agent” in the development process and the idea of a “view” or “perspective” which an actor maintains." An important idea in this paper was to distinguish "a representation style, the scheme and notation by which the viewpoint expresses what it can see" and "a specification, the statements expressed in the viewpoint's style describing particular domains". Subsequent work, such as IEEE 1471, preserved this distinction by utilizing two separate terms: viewpoint and view, respectively.

Since the early 1990s there have been a number of efforts to codify approaches for describing and analyzing system architectures. These are often terms architecture frameworks or sometimes viewpoint sets. Many of these have been funded by the United States Department of Defense, but some have sprung from international or national efforts in ISO or the IEEE. Among these, the IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems (IEEE Std 1471-2000) established useful definitions of view, viewpoint, stakeholder and concern and guidelines for documenting a system architecture through the use of multiple views by applying viewpoints to address stakeholder concerns.

IEEE 1471 (now ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011, Systems and software engineering — Architecture description) prescribes the contents of architecture descriptions and describes their creation and use under a number of scenarios, including precedented and unprecedented design, evolutionary design, and capture of design of existing systems. In all of these scenarios the overall process is the same: identify stakeholders, elicit concerns, identify a set of viewpoints to be used, and then apply these viewpoint specifications to develop the set of views relevant to the system of interest. Rather than define a particular set of viewpoints, the standard provides uniform mechanisms and requirements for architects and organizations to define their own viewpoints. In 1996 the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) was published to provide a useful framework for describing the architecture and design of large scale distributed systems.