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What is Software Architecture?

When you build your house, you would never think about building it without an architect, correct? However, many medium to large size software projects are build without a software architect. That seems kind of scary, and you might wonder why? Well, the role of the software architect has neither been widely understood, nor his necessity been acknowledged. Even to date there is still no agreement on the precise definition of the term “software architecture”.

 Matthew R. McBride writes, "a software architect is a technically competent system-level thinker, guiding planned and efficient design processes to bring a system into existence. He is viewed by customers and developers alike as a technical expert. The architect is the author of the solution, accountable for its success or failure." The term software architecture also refers to documentation of a system's software architecture. Documenting software architecture facilitates communication between stakeholders, documents early decisions about high-level design, and allows reuse of design components and patterns between projects.

Why Architecture is important?

Software architecture, also described as strategic design, is an activity concerned with global requirements governing how a solution is implemented such as programming paradigms, architectural styles, component-based software engineering standards, architectural patterns, security, scale, integration, and law-governed regularities. Functional design, also described as tactical design, is an activity concerned with local requirements governing what a solution does such as algorithms, design patterns, programming idioms, refactoring, and low-level implementation.

 Architecture is design but not all design is architectural. In practice, the architect is the one who draws the line between software architecture (architectural design) and detailed design (non-architectural design). There aren't rules or guidelines that fit all cases. Examples of rules or heuristics that architects (or organizations) can establish when they want to distinguish between architecture and detailed design include:
  • Architecture is driven by non-functional requirements, while functional design is driven by functional requirements.
  • Pseudo-code belongs in the detailed design document.
  • UML(Unified Modelling Language) component, deployment, and package diagrams generally appear in software architecture documents; UML class, object, and behavior diagrams appear in detailed functional design documents.
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