Software Architecture | Software Engineering Institute

The software architecture of a system represents the design decisions related to overall system structure and behavior. Architecture helps stakeholders understand and analyze how the system will achieve essential qualities such as modifiability, availability, and security.

Software architecture supports analysis of system qualities when teams are making decisions about the system rather than after implementation, integration, or deployment. Whether designing a new system, evolving a successful system, or modernizing a legacy system, this timely analysis enables teams to determine whether the approaches they’ve chosen will yield an acceptable solution. An effective architecture serves as the conceptual glue that holds every phase of the project together for all of its stakeholders, enabling agility, time and cost savings, and early identification of design risks.

Building an effective architecture that enables rapid product delivery for today’s needs while also addressing long-term goals can prove challenging. Failing to identify, prioritize, and manage trade-offs among architecturally significant qualities often leads to project delays, costly rework, or worse.

An effective software architecture supported by agile architecture practices enables effective continuous system evolution. Such practices include documenting the architectural elements and interrelationships intended to achieve key qualities; repeatedly evaluating the architecture for fitness with respect to an organization’s business and mission goals; and analyzing the deployed system for conformance to an architecture. When performed correctly, these practices enable predictable product quality, fewer downstream problems, time and cost savings in integration and test, and cost-effective system evolution.