Markus Voelter was interviewed by InfoQ during OOPSLA 2007, and was asked to share his opinion on today's practices about writing software architecture documentation. Markus certainly supports the importance of writing such documents, but he has a different take on that compared to the general trend. Many people think of UML as the main tool used to write software architecture documents, but Markus says UML is not the right tool. While he agrees that UML has its benefits, he continues pointing out that we should be using tools which allow us to create a formal model which can be automatically processed and its integrity can be verified. Then we should be able to generate the code from it, including the infrastructure dependency code.
Markus Voelter is also a great fan of patterns when it comes to documenting the architecture. He says that we should be using patters whenever possible because the reader will be able to understand the documents faster and clearer when we use commonly shared concepts.
The entire interview can be accessed here.