The Need for Architecture

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Over the years I have heard many definitions of software architecture that range from "software architecture is what software architects do" to "software architecture is politics." I have come to the conclusion that software architecture is very difficult to define. It is a range of artifacts that are used to specify the strategic decisions about the structure and behavior of the system, the collaborations among the system elements, and the physical deployment of the system.

"Establishing a sound architectural foundation is absolutely essential to the success of an object-oriented project. Some teams try to ignore this phase, either because they are in such a rush to get a product out quickly they feel they don't have time to architect, or because they don't believe that architecting gives them any real value. Either way, the resulting head-long rush to code is always disastrous: fail to carry out this step properly, and your project will likely experience software meltdown." ^[1]

^[1] Booch, Grady. Object Solutions . Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Architecture development is a very complicated issue. The architecture of the system is developed iteratively in the elaboration phase of development. "The architecture of a proposed system does not appear in a flash. It takes exploration of the use cases, a proof-of-concept prototype, an architectural baseline, and other efforts during the Inception and Elaboration phases." ^[2] Executable prototypes of the architecture are built to verify that the design decisions are correct. "Building something executable is absolutely essential, because it forces the development team to validate their design assumptions in the harsh light of reality." ^[3]

^[2] Jacobson, Ivar. The Objector Software Development Process . Draft edition.

^[3] Ibid.

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