Goals

Goals of this community

Short term

The OpenSolaris ARChitecture community is responsible for driving the development, deployment and use of transparent processes that guide the evolution of OpenSolaris' architecture, both at the macro (Systems) and micro (Project) levels.

Long Term

The OpenSolaris Architecture Community expects to spend its time and
resources on architectural development and review, with a goal of helping
to manage risk in OpenSolaris so we can consistently fulfill our users' expectations of stability and predictability, across community and consolidation lines and over generations of releases.  While risk manifests itself in several
ways, this community is primarily concerned with that associated with
developing and maintaining complex systems.  Project teams and their
associated (sub) communities are expected to be concerned more about
immediate project and community focused risks.

By being intentional about understanding the impact of proposed
architectural changes, this community hopes to review and approve technical aspects of software projects, implementing a process to manage technical change in the architecture of OpenSolaris and its software systems. These architectural  reviews:

• collect and archive project specifications, 
• assure the developers' plans are technically sound and consistent with OpenSolaris conventions and existing products,
• ensure users can accept present and future releases, and
• perform systems analysis by understanding the impact of changes on a greater than project/product scope.

The focus is on understanding architectural change because change
introduces risk; we look at interfaces because they are the mechanism by
which we tie together the various components of our systems.

The purpose of an ARC review

• to ensure that a description of each engineering project exists so that others  can understand what the project is.
• to provide a consultation service with a group of senior engineers whose expertise is in the area of their project.
• to identify any duplication of effort, over-engineering, quality problems, or dangerous effects on the strategic direction of the system architecture.
• provide a formal forum for the discussion and resolution of architectural issues
• discover and characterize architectural issues
• improve inter-project coordination: foster communication between groups and decrease the likelihood that projects conflict with (or duplicate) each other.

The work of this group will be reflected in

• An archive of change-request cases that contains proposals, architectural specifications, discussion logs and opinions
• A listing of cases along with their status/disposition
• An agenda or other work-in-progress indication.
• Advice and feedback to the CAB, the various communities and to project teams on how to improve OpenSolaris at all levels.
• promote positive architectural changes by identifying dead-ends, point products, and unnecessary modifications.

Non-Goals

Although the OpenSolaris ARC community as a whole is not responsible for the following, it is presumed that its community members (in their role as project and community leaders elsewhere in OpenSolaris) will be doing them.

• Inventing new architecture - that is the responsibility of Communities and their projects...
• Designing projects 
• Generation of product strategy
• Design review of implementation
• Writing specifications