Few accounts of architectural methodology are as succinct as Phillippe Kruchten's 15-page paper Architectural Blueprints: The "4+1" View Model of Software Architecture. Kruchten (IEEE Software, 12 (6) 42-50, November 1995) published the paper in 1995 while helping to develop the Rational Unified Process. Software architectures at the time, Kruchten notes, were poorly structured, and manifested this poor structure by cramming too much varied detail into a single diagram. In too many diagrams it is difficult, Kruchten argues, to decide which boxes are machines and which are logical software modules, or which arrows mean control flow and which mean data flow.
Kruchten proposes that architecture be presented as four separate 'technical' views: