According to Perry and Wolf [1], Water polo is just an analogy for
software architectures. I knew I learned something in grad school.
Greg
[1] http://www.cs.colorado.edu/users/alw/RecentPubs.html#sen1092
ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/users/alw/papers/sen1092.ps.Z
Consider the example of water polo as a metaphor for
the different classes of elements: the swimmers are the
processing elements, the ball is the data element, and
water is the primary connecting element (the \glue").
Consider further the similarities of water polo, polo, and
soccer. They all have a similar \architecture" but dif-
fer in the \glue" | that is, they have similar elements,
shapes and forms, but di er mainly in the context in
which they are played and in the way that the elements
are connected together. We shall see below that
connecting elements play a fundamental part in distin-
guishing one architecture from another and may have
an important effect on the characteristics of a particu-
lar architecture or architectural style.