C4 Model: a Research Guide for Designing Software Architectures

Given nowadays increasing complexity of software systems, their architectural design prior to their actual implementation becomes quite complicated. As a result, robust architectural design methodologies need to be put in place to ensure systems' interoperability, maintainability, as well as performance. This work explores the significance of having in place a Software Architecture (SA) for these systems, emphasizing on the underlying architecture design and modeling principles. Among the various existing architectural design approaches, the C4 model has gained prominence for its clarity and hierarchical representation of systems' components, being furtherly investigated in this work. To this context, the advantages of adopting the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{C 4}$</tex> model in SA design is presented, detailing its fourlayered structure (i.e., Context, Container, Component, Code). To depict the documented concepts into a real case study, the C4 model is exploited for illustrating the FAME Data Marketplace's architecture, summarizing the contributing remarks of such model upon the FAME system. The study highlights how the C4 model enhances communication among stakeholders, facilitates system maintenance, and improves overall software design, while the future work includes extending this modeling approach to additional real-world case studies.