CURA: Complex-system Unified reference architecture position paper: A practitioner view

Constructing enterprise-level solution requires integration of existing, modified, and new modular technologies. A customer specific solution is instantiated from a reference implementation owned by the services organization, as a result of multiple products and their reference design created by the R&D organization. Yet, the disciplines of R&D and enterprise architecture differ in their analysis and design processes, artifacts, and semantics, leading to a mismatch in product design, knowledge and requirements interpretation. The Complex-systems Unified Reference Architecture (CURA) was developed as a common platform for both field and R&D practices. This methodology binds a 4-layered structure and a 4-phased architecture process, controlling the solution architecture lifecycle from reference design to reference implementation and solution instantiation, and fits both agile and DevOps methodologies. The presented version of CURA was tested and implemented with several customers as a lean and minimal blueprinting approach, serving as part of the architectural deliverables. CURA can be adjusted to other visual binding notations such as UML and TOGAF modeling languages, and can scale up to system-of-systems design.