You can find the well written brief on Phillippe Kruchten’s 4+1 architectural view model on Wikipedia along with a link to the original white paper published nearly 20 years ago. Kruchten worked for Rational, as I understand it, and so this is often referred to as the RUP 4+1 model.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Although I have used this model or some variant of it at times, I had quite forgotten its name and origin until someone reminded me of it the other day. Of course, we often forget that UML also came out of Rational’s famous Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh..

And yet today I find it difficult to find software developers who know much of anything about the 4+1 model and only a few regularly use UML and even then only for simple class diagrams. So why the disconnect?

Perhaps a Version 2 of these approaches is required. What would you get if you mixed the 4+1 model with more clearly defined non-functional requirement scenarios as I’ve previously discussed and the C4 model presented by Simon Brown along with just a bit more UML that most developers are not currently accustomed to using? I’m thinking this through and will post more thoughts on it soon.