> where is the modern 'IDE' for the Software Architect? Generally architecture is about imposing constraints on the system. If you think about it that way, wha

> where is the modern 'IDE' for the Software Architect? Generally architecture is about imposing constraints on the system. If you think about it that way, what you really want is not to be treating Visio and PowerPoint documents as the primary artifacts. You want to define the modules (in Parnas's sense) and their interfaces and executable specifications. You want tooling that lets you constrain what modules may use other modules, automatically test modules, automatically mock modules, and be alerted when the constraints are broken. Now, most of the tooling for this probably doesn't exist, or exists in partial, widely scattered forms. For example, you can define a Java package with the interfaces of a module and then have some kind of hook in the build system that checks that it is not being imported in places it shouldn't be. You can mark the interfaces that should be considered architectural constraints with a custom annotation and build a tool to extract out all uses of them and plot connections. But I am unaware of any toolkit that will do what you want.