Fundamental concepts for practical software architecture

  • Authors:
  • Alexander Ran

  • Affiliations:
  • Nokia Research Center

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Architecture of software is a collection of design decisions that are expensive to change. How to identify which design decisions are expensive to change? What are architecture views and which views are needed to adequately describe the architecture of a specific system? How to create and manage software architecture for a product family? This tutorial offers answers to these and other questions that arise in the context of complex software development. We introduce a system of concepts useful in order to understand, design, and evaluate architecture of software intensive systems and system families. Our approach utilizes different software structures in order to control important system qualities related to its development, performance, and evolution. We draw our experience primarily from software embedded in voice and data communication systems. However the same principles can be applied to software architecture in other domains. This tutorial should be useful to engineers and technical managers involved in construction or evaluation of complex software.