Architectural Design

Fovir6/9/25About 620 words

Software Architecture

Architectural Design:
- The design process for identifying the sub-systems making up a system.
- And the framework for subsystems control and communication.
Software Architecture: the output of Architectural Design process.

It is concerned with understanding how a software system should be organized and designing the overall structure of that system.
Architectural design is the critical link between design and requirements engineering, as it identifies the main structural components in a system and the relationships between them.
The output of the architectural design process is an architectural model that describes how the system is organized as a set of communicating components.
Software architecture affects the performance, robustness, disreputability, and maintainability of a system.

Architecture in the small is concerned with the architecture of individual programs. At the level, an individual program is decomposed into components.
Architecture in the large is concerned with the architecture of complex enterprise systems that include other systems, and program components.
These enterprise systems are distributed over different computers, which may be owned and managed bu different companies.

There are four architecture view:

Logic view
- Shows the key abstractions in the system as objects or object classes.
Process view
- Show how the system is composed of interacting processes at run-time.
Development view
- Shows how the software is decomposed for development.
Physical view
- Shows the system hardware and how software components are distributed across the processors in the system.

Informal block diagrams showing entities and relationships are the most frequently used method for documenting software architectures.

They have the following disadvantages:

Lack of semantics.
Do not show the types of relationships between entities nor the visible properties of entities in the architecture.
It depends on the use of architectural models. And the requirements for model semantics depends on how the model are used.
It is very abstract, because they do not show the nature of component relationships nor the externally visible properties of the sub-systems.

On the other hand, they also have advantage, which is useful for communication with stakeholders and for project planning.

Stakeholder Communication
- Architecture may be used as focus of discussion by system stakeholders.
System Analysis
- Make it possible to analyze whether the system can meet its non-functional requirements.
Large-scale Reuse
- The architecture may be reusable across a range of systems.
- Product-line architectures may be developed.

As a way of facilitating discussion about the system design:
- A high-level architectural view of a system is useful for communication with system stakeholders and project planning because it is not cluttered with detail.
- Stakeholders can relate to it and understand an abstract view of the system.
- Stakeholders can discuss the system as a whole without being confused by detail.
As a way of documenting an architecture that has been designed.
- The aim is to produce a complete system model that shows the different components in a system, their interfaces, and their connections.

Architectural design is a creative process so the differs depending on the type of system being developed.

However, a number of common decisions span all design processes and these decisions affect the non-functional characteristics of the system.

Systems in the same domain often have similar architecture that reflect domain concepts.
Application product lines are built around a core architecture with variants that satisfy particular customer requirements.
The architecture of a system may be designed around one of more architectural patterns or styles.
These capture the essence of an architecture and can be instantiated in different ways.