These diagrams
Clearly, these diagrams give value
- You can find them all over the web, in textbooks, in technical documents, in research papers, over whiteboards in your office, on napkins in the cafeteria, etc.
At the same time, they are generally ill-defined: what does a box represent? an arrow? a layer? adjacent boxes? etc.
One view of software architecture research is to determine ways to give these diagrams clearer semantics and thus additional value