Drupal design goals and software architecture

Hello list,

I am a doctoral student at the university of Toronto doing research in software engineering. I am new to Drupal and started to read up on it.

I am considering analyzing key design decisions of Drupal with respect to Drupals design goals and how these decisions evolve as new design goals are added. I am in particular interested in decisions that shape the framework aspect of Drupal.

To get started I was wondering, does there exists a documented software architecture of Drupal – perhaps even at module level. Also are the design goals of Drupal, and in particular of the core somewhere documented.

I am also interested in learning if there exists some kind of work allocation map – which documents the current design and development responsibilities over the different parts of the Drupal architecture – do committers know who is responsible for what – in particular within the core or close to the core.

I am hopeful that the results of my investigation would add another interesting facet to the documentation of Drupal which would help to quickly identify important core design decisions, and help understand why they were made, and also how and why some key architecture decisions and goals evolved over time.

Much appreciating your response,

Daniel