Instead, engineers access relevant design experience by referencing design handbooks. Several researchers have noted that a major difference between software engineering and more mature engineering disciplines is the availability of such handbooks. AMS's handbook is typically used in a number of different ways - as a facilitation tool during requirements gathering, as a starting point for prototyping, as a ready reference during design, and as a design review checklist. AMS experience is that such a design handbook, serving as a mechanism for pooling hard-won experience in successful design, is an important step in evolving towards architectural development approaches. This brings us to the third aspect of architecture - architectural methodology.
Architectural methodology has some important differences from traditional process-based methodology.
For example, let's consider how fully evolved architectural development of a repair dispatch application might proceed. Developers would quickly recognize repair dispatch as a workflow-centered application. They would gather requirements by walking through a formal workflow model with the sponsor to match the domain terminology of repair dispatch to the generic terminology of the workflow model. This would account for a good proportion of the requirements analysis and design phases of traditional approaches and proceed much faster. Developers would then adapt standard workflow components to actually create the application.