Enhancing Architecture Frameworks by Including Modern Stakeholders and their Views/Viewpoints

TL;DR

This paper proposes extending existing architecture frameworks to include data science and ML stakeholders, emphasizing the need for new modeling practices for ML components in system architectures.

Contribution

It introduces an extension to architecture frameworks to incorporate ML-related concerns, based on an empirical survey of experts across multiple organizations.

Findings

ML stakeholders are currently missing from architecture frameworks.

ML components require distinct modeling approaches from traditional software.

Survey results highlight the importance of integrating ML perspectives into architecture practices.

Abstract

Various architecture frameworks for software, systems, and enterprises have been proposed in the literature. They identified several stakeholders and defined modeling perspectives, architecture viewpoints, and views to frame and address stakeholder concerns. However, the stakeholders with data science and Machine Learning (ML) related concerns, such as data scientists and data engineers, are yet to be included in existing architecture frameworks. Only this way can we envision a holistic system architecture description of an ML-enabled system. Note that the ML component behavior and functionalities are special and should be distinguished from traditional software system behavior and functionalities. The main reason is that the actual functionality should be inferred from data instead of being specified at design time. Additionally, the structural models of ML components, such as ML model architectures, are typically specified using different notations and formalisms from what the Software Engineering (SE) community uses for software structural models. Yet, these two aspects, namely ML and non-ML, are becoming so intertwined that it necessitates an extension of software architecture frameworks and modeling practices toward supporting ML-enabled system architectures. In this paper, we address this gap through an empirical study using an online survey instrument. We surveyed 61 subject matter experts from over 25 organizations in 10 countries.