Software Architecture : Designing And Creation Of A Structured Framework

Purpose of this assignment: To demonstrate understanding of principles of software design, in relation to specific programming scenarios, and how these principles relate to the software development life cycle.

The focus of this paper, therefore, is to look at the analysis of the book by Kecia Ali. It will look at some of the arguments that she has that leads her to make that conclusion. It will also include evidence to support them and its contributions to similar books in the field.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

The world is becoming more and more dependent on software systems. It is difficult to find any organization today that is not reliant or dependent on complex software systems in order to function. Software systems are comprised of many components and have become increasingly complex over time. As the complexity of the software systems grew, it has introduced new design problems and challenges. Many organizations adopted software architecture to resolve those challenges and problems and to build solid and reliable systems needed by organizations today.

In order to better understand the similarities and differences between software architecture and building architecture one needs to know what software is. According to "Software Engineering Institute" (2015), "The software architecture of a program

discipline that came to light back in the 1960s when many projects regarding software systems’ design

Component Adaptation: we noted that software architecture represents design patterns that are composed of components (units of functionality), connections, and coordination. In essence the architecture defines the design rules for all components, identifying modes of connection and coordination. In some cases, existing reusable components may be mismatched to the architecture’s design rules. These components must be adapted to meet the needs of the architecture or discarded and replaced by other, more suitable components.

Mainly software architecture deals with the design and implementation of high level structure in software.It is the result of combination of many architectural elements in some well chose from to satisfy the functionality requirements and non functional requirements like reliability,scalability,portability,and avalibility.

John W. Brackett states that “The subject of software requirements is often given far less attention in software engineering education Because of the dependence of this module on than software design, even though its importance is Software Specification: The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements, including all the inter-faces to people, to machines and to other software systems. No part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later” (Brackett, 1996). This paper will give the definition of software requirements; how they are determined, specified, documented, and who is included in the process of requirements; and the roles these individuals play in processing requirements. The end of this paper will bring all of these concepts together to help explain why these processes are extremely important.

Software documentation is an integral part of the software development process. For many different kinds of systems, different attributes of the system such as performance, reliability, security, and modifiability are equally as important as the output of the system. Software architecture documentation is an important component of this process because it allows for cooperation, synchronization, collaboration, on different elements that need to be documented and communicated among different parties that are stakeholders in the system. The documentation can serve many parties that have a stake in the system such as the designers, the developers, the project manager, the end-users, the investors, and even the marketing department.

In the paper Architectural Blueprints—The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture by Phillipe Kruchten, he examines how developers can use multiple views to capture the software architecture and how these views are more desirable than a single viewport that tries to capture everything. Each view, should ideally, address one specific set of concerns. For Kruchten, software architecture is the deliberate assembling of various architectural elements to fulfill the requirements of the system. The intent was to come up with a mechanism to separate the different aspects of a software system into different views of the system. This is because different stakeholders always have different interest in a software system. Some features of a system

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is a design pattern which involves using web services in order to perform various business operations. This type of architecture enables applications to be more flexible and adaptable to changing business and consumer requirements. A Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of software systems that share certain common features in terms of their specifications, the market segment they are built for and the principles they are built by. Service Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines are two concepts that led to the emergence of Model Driven Architectures. Model Driven Architectures (MDA) is a concept that was developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) in 2001. [1] The concept of Model Driven Architectures was developed in order to tackle the challenges presented by complexity and change. Rapidly changing requirements and technologies introduce various changes in software. These changes, in turn, result in the introduction of complexity in software or a family of software. Model Driven Architectures attempt to connect platform-specific and platform-independent implementations in a software product line. [4]

The list of adopted technologies in OMG include (UML) in 1997, Model Driven Architecture (MDA), System Modelling Language (SysML) and Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) in 2006. The OMG’ architecture objective are to give a benefit application developers by making it easier for developers in building a large-scale, industrial strength applications through standard components. In making decision especially in meeting, they are a few OMG committees that involved which is Architecture Board, various Task Forces, Subcommittees, Platform, Special Interest Groups and Domain Technical Committees.

An architectural design performs key functions, and is of crucial importance in software engineering during the phase of software development where the essential requirements of reliability, cost, and performance are determined. Architectural design provides the definition of the abstraction level at which the software design specifies both the functional and performance behaviors of the system, and the guidelines for enhancing the system by

(Fig. 1) [1]. The 4+1 views allow developer to comprehend a complex system in terms of its essential characteristics. The views of the system architecture are not completely independent. Elements of one view are connected to elements in other views. [3]