Software Architecture

Abstract

Abstract As the size and complexity of software systems increase, the design, specification, and analysis of overall system structure becomes a critical issue. Structural issues include the organization of a system as a composition of components; global control structures, the protocols for communication, synchronization, and data access; the assignment of functionality to design elements; the composition of design elements; physical distribution; scaling and performance; and dimensions of evolution. This is the software architecture level of design. Over the past decade architectural design has emerged as an important subfield of software engineering. Practitioners have come to realize that having a good architectural design is a critical success factor for complex system development. A good architecture can help ensure that a system will satisfy key requirements in such areas as performance, reliability, portability, scalability, and interoperability. A bad architecture can be disastrous. Practitioners have also begun to recognize the value of making explicit architectural choices, and leveraging past architectural designs in the development of new products. Today there are numerous books on architectural design, regular conferences and workshops devoted specifically to software architecture, a growing number of commercial tools to aid in aspects of architectural design, courses in software architecture, major government and industrial research projects centered on software architecture, and an increasing number of formal architectural standards. Codification of architectural principles, methods, and practices has begun to lead to repeatable processes of architectural design, criteria for making principled tradeoffs among architectures, and standards for documenting, reviewing, and implementing architectures. The role of the architecture, description language and tools are discussed.