Applying the Software Engineering Taxonomy

The Software Engineering Taxonomy is a derivative of the Zachman framework. Being a derivative of the Zachman framework, the Software Engineering Taxonomy follows the Zachman consistency rules and incorporates traditional enterprise architecture views together with software engineering views. In this report, the Software Engineering Taxonomy is applied as a reasoning framework in three studies: the Influencing Factors method field study, the Usability Supporting Architecture Patterns field study, and the Sustainable Industrial Software Systems case study. Software engineering artifacts from the three studies are extracted and classified in the Software Engineering Taxonomy. From the classification of data from the studies, it’s shown that each one of the studies uses a subset of the thirty views in the Software Engineering Taxonomy to describe a specific method or theory. What views are used, depends on the scope of the researched object. In the classification of the USAP study artifacts, eight views were used in contrast to the Sustainable System study, that used nineteen views. This shows that, the scope and interrelation complexity of sustainable development is much higher than the scope and interrelation complexity of the usability-supporting architecture pattern. It also shows that the software engineering discipline needs enterprise perspectives to be able to include all aspects of sustainable industrial software system development. Classification of the USAP artifacts made use of the business concept perspective for four of the twelve artifacts. The inclusion of a traditional enterprise perspective led to new conclusions regarding the use of general activities for pattern creation. General domain application activities and their tasks make use of the domain’s role and work product as placeholder to make general activities and tasks domain application specific. The reusable task has reusable responsibilities and by specifying what quality attribute the task support, the responsibilities can be constructed to support that specific quality of the task. This has been shown for usability in the USAP study. The USAP information description-selection process could be composed by following Zachman’s consistency rules in the Software Engineering Taxonomy.