Software Architect and Software Architecture

What is Software Architecture?

Software Architecture is the structure of a software system, it's fundamental properties and the principles of its design and evolution.
  • Structure: It is about identifying the architecturally significant pieces of a system and defining the relationship between them.
  • Properties: It is about the functional properties of a system and its quality properties like performance, scalability, security, etc.
  • Principles: It is about understanding the principles behind its design. An understanding that allows the system to evolve in a consistent and logical way without introducing unnecessary complexity.

What is the importance of Software Architecture?

The need for Software Architecture is best summarized in the following statement:
"Software architecture represents a system's earliest set of design decisions. These early decisions are the most difficult to get correct and the hardest to change later in the development process, and they have the most far-reaching effects."
  • Early design decisions: Software architecture manifests the earliest design decisions about a system, that far outweighs any other decisions made later with respect to the system's remaining development, its deployment, and its maintenance life.
  • Transferable abstraction of a system: Software architecture constitutes a relatively small logical model of a system that is transferable across different software systems. It promotes re-use by applying it to other systems that are similar in functional and quality attributes.
  • Communication among stakeholders: Software architecture represents a common abstraction of a system that system's stakeholders can use as a basis for mutual understanding, negotiation, consensus, and communication.

What does a Software Architect need to learn?

A Software Architect creates an Architecture and plays a leading role in the realization of the architecture into a physical product or system. A Software Architect needs to have a good understanding of
  • System Viewpoint - The ability to see a software system as a whole
    • Identifying architecturally significant elements of a system.
    • Design principles for building and extending systems.
  • Technology - Tools, platforms and techniques available to reliably build functionality and meet system quality requirements.
  • Processes - Methods to construct, deploy, operate and maintain systems that are available 24X7 with very high uptimes.
  • System Requirements - Techniques to achieve system requirements such as:
    • Concurrency
    • Scalability
    • Performance
    • Availability
    • Reliability
    • Security
    • Interoperability

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