Philippe Kruchten, Grady Booch, Kurt Bittner, and Rich Reitman derived and refined a definition of residential architects in Palm Springs based on work by Mary Shaw and David Garlan (Shaw and Garlan 1996). Their definition is:
“Software architecture encompasses the set of significant decisions about the organization of a software system including the selection of the structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed; behavior as specified in collaboration among those elements; composition of these structural and behavioral elements into larger subsystems; and an architectural style that guides this organization. Software architecture also involves functionality, usability, resilience, performance, reuse, comprehensibility, economic and technology constraints, tradeoffs and aesthetic concerns.”
In Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler outlines some common recurring themes when explaining architecture. He identifies these themes as:
“The highest-level breakdown of a system into its parts; the decisions that are Hard to change; there are multiple architectures in a system; what is architecturally Significant can change over a system’s lifetime; and, in the end, architecture boils Down to whatever the important stuff is.”
Software application architecture is the process of defining and coming up with a solution that is well structured and meets all of the technical and operational requirements. The architecture should be able to take into account and improve upon the common quality attributes such as performance, security, and manageability.
The main focus of the Software architecture is how the major elements and components within an application are used by, or interact with, other major elements and components within the application. The selection of data structures and algorithms or the implementation details of individual components are design concerns, they are not an architectural concerns but sometimes Design and Architecture concerns overlap.
Before starting the architecting of any software, there are some basic questions that we should strive to get answers for. They are as follows:
How the users of the system will be interacting with the system?
How will the application be deployed into production and managed?
What are the various non-functional requirements for the application, such as security, performance, concurrency, internationalization, and configuration?
How can the application be designed to be flexible and maintainable over time?
What are the architectural trends that might impact your application now or after it has been deployed?
Goals of Software Architecture
Building the bridge between business requirements and technical requirements is the main goal of any software architecture. The goal of architecture is to identify the requirements that affect the basic structure of the application. Good architecture reduces the business risks associated with building a technical solution while a good design is flexible enough to be able to handle the changes that will occur over time in hardware and software technology, as well as in user scenarios and requirements. An architect must consider the overall effect of design decisions, the inherent tradeoffs between quality attributes (such as performance and security), and the tradeoffs required to address user, system, and business requirements.
