Views and viewpoints are concepts usually adopted in an important number of works insoftware engineering in different domains, like in requirements specification, system modeling, systemimplementation, and mainly in software architectures.This paper presents a survey about the use of viewpoints in these different domains, and leads a compar-ative synthesis between different approaches in order to induce their limitations. Also, it briefly presentsthe main characteristics of our views based approach MoVAL that solves two kinds of problems dur-ing view-based software development: the stakeholders’ communication complexity and the lack of anarchitecture definition process guiding architect during architecture construction.