ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 — Architecture Description
How ISO 42010 stakeholder, concern, and viewpoint concepts underpin the NexoGraph entity model.
ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2022 (Systems and software engineering — Architecture description) defines the terminology and concepts for describing the architecture of any system. It establishes a precise vocabulary for the relationship between stakeholders, their concerns, and the architectural views that address those concerns.
This standard directly shapes how NexoGraph models stakeholders, needs, and the package/view structure.
Core Concepts
| Concept | ISO 42010 definition |
|---|---|
| System | Collection of elements organized to accomplish one or more purposes |
| Architecture | Fundamental concepts or properties of a system, embodied in its elements, relationships, and principles governing its design and evolution |
| Architectural Description (AD) | Work product used to express an architecture |
| Stakeholder | Individual, team, or organization with interests in or concerns about a system |
| Concern | Interest in a system relevant to one or more stakeholders |
| Viewpoint | Rules and conventions for constructing and using a view |
| View | Work product expressing the architecture of a system from the perspective of specific concerns |
| Model | Partial description of a system from a particular perspective |
Distinction: Concerns vs Requirements
A key insight from ISO 42010 is that stakeholder concerns are not the same as system requirements. Concerns are higher-level interests — performance, reliability, security, maintainability — that may span multiple requirements and cannot always be precisely quantified.
NexoGraph separates these layers:
StakeholderNeedcaptures the concern in the stakeholder's own languageRequirementcaptures the verifiable, quantified system-level expression of that concern
NexoGraph Alignment
| ISO 42010 concept | NexoGraph implementation |
|---|---|
| Stakeholder | Stakeholder entity |
| Concern | StakeholderNeed entity (the stakeholder's expressed concern) |
| System | Top-level Package — the system under development |
| Viewpoint | Package typed as an architectural view grouping |
| View | Package containing model elements for a specific viewpoint |
| Architectural Description | The complete graph of entities and relations in a workspace |
| Model | Collections of related entities (Requirement, UserStory, etc.) within a package |
Stakeholder–Concern Chain
The reference relation stakeholder-has-need implements the ISO 42010 stakeholder-concern association. Because this is a many-to-many (n:m) relation, the same concern can be shared by multiple stakeholders — exactly as ISO 42010 requires.