Essay about Week3 Individual Assignment

Like any other complex structure, software must be built on a solid foundation. Failing to see the big picture or consider key scenarios, failing to design for common problems, or failing to appreciate the long term consequences of key decisions can put your application at risk. Modern tools and platforms help to simplify the task of building applications, but they do not replace the need to design your application carefully, based on your specific scenarios and requirements. The risks exposed by poor architecture include software that is unstable, is unable to support existing or future business requirements, or is difficult to deploy or manage in a production environment. Software architecture must be distinguished from lower-level design (e.g., design of component internals and algorithms) and implementation.

Computer architecture is a set of rules that say how software and hardware interact to create a network or platform. In other words computer architecture is the design of the network base on the needs of the user, the system if it is there or needs to be built, and the technology that needs to go into the project. System design is all how all the hardware is set up while the instruction set architecture is the program language.

Explain the role of software design principles and software structures in the IT systems development lifecycle

IT Architecture: Same as IS Vision, designing IT Architecture is also deals with information resource management for present and future use. The designing of IT Architecture should support the future IT needs. Cloud Computing is one of the best Solution for modular IT architecture now a days. Business Managers view also indicates the future here, as organization grows normally todays IT infrastructure should supports the tomorrows business needs and technology.

The World Wide Web is established on numerous different technologies that make it possible for users to find and share data through the internet. For example there are Web browsers, HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and HTML (hypertext Markup language).

The combination of Data Architecture and Applications Architecture is also referred to as the Information Systems Architecture (The Open Group, 2011).

This holistic approach can be demonstrated through implementing Enterprise Architecture, which is “a comprehensive operational framework that explores all of an organizations functional areas while defining how technology benefits and serves the organization's overall mission.” Enterprise Architecture shows how operating systems, programs, networks, and hardware can be used in every part of the organization to accomplish its objectives (Techopedia).

Architectural framework mainly provides principles and practices in order to create and use the architectural description of a system.

In order to establish an architecture for a system, we need to know the purpose and scope of the application, its importance and relationship to the overall strategic goals of the organization based on known requirements of the system being developed. However in an Agile environment where the requirements are groomed iteratively and change is constant, establishing architecture and design would be a daunting task. Especially if the system being developed is large enterprise level solution, iterative architecture and design could result in a lot of rework and redundancy. If there are many integration points and functionality spans across multiple applications, defining enterprise level architecture helps the software being developed to align with strategic goals of the enterprise, helping business capabilities to be shared across organizations. But establishing such architecture in an Agile environment would be challenging. This paper addresses this issue and establishes a process for architecture development for enterprise level applications. The paper defines a process to develop a software solution which spans across multiple legacy applications using Agile principles’. The approach explained in the paper has been adopted for the development of software which modernizes legacy data capture and is intended to establish a framework for enterprise level services in the future. The solution spans across 6 legacy software systems.

Entity service is the most reusable and usually contain the create, read, update, and delete methods.

The focus of object-oriented view is on the elaboration of design classes that belong to both problem and infrastructure domains. Classes are elaborated by specifying messaging details, identifying interfaces, defining attribute data structures, and describing process flow for operations. In traditional view, three components are refined, they are control modules, domain modules, and infrastructure modules. To generate programming language source code detailed representations of data structures, interfaces and algorithms for each program are to be created.

“Enterprise architecture framework maps all of the software development process within the enterprise and how they relate and interact to fulfill the enterprises mission.”[1] Frameworks are conceptually created to eliminate conflicts in the development phase. An easy transition and systematic architecture are essential functions to process an enterprise. The following paper discusses TOGAF in detail, along with DoDAF and FEAF.

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

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.

A design pattern solves a problem within a given context. The solution that is offered by implementing a pattern results in a system design structure, which balances the concerns of the design problem in a manner most appropriate for the given context. In “Understanding and Using Patterns in Software Development”, Dirk Riehle and Heinz Zullighaven offer a rather nice definition of what a design pattern is: