This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
2.7 Summary
In this chapter, we introduced the idea of design as a set of decisions to satisfy requirements and constraints. We also introduced the notion of “architectural” design and showed that it does not differ from design in general, other than that it addresses the satisfaction of architectural drivers: the purpose, primary functionality, quality attribute requirements, architectural concerns, and constraints. What makes a decision “architectural”? A decision is architectural if it has nonlocal consequences and those consequences matter to the achievement of an architectural driver.
We also discussed why architectural design is so important: because it is the embodiment of early, far-reaching, hard-to-change decisions. These decisions will help you meet your architectural drivers, will determine much of your project’s work-breakdown structure, and will affect the tools, skills, and technologies needed to realize the system. Thus architectural design decisions should be scrutinized well, as their consequences are profound. In addition, architecture is a key enabler of agility.
Architectural design is guided by certain principles. For example, to achieve good modularity, high coupling, and low cohesion, the wise architect will probably include some form of layering in the architecture being designed. Similarly, to achieve high availability, an architect will likely choose a pattern involving some form of redundancy and failover, such as active–passive redundancy, where an active server sends real-time updates to a passive server, so that the passive server can replace the active server in case it fails, with no loss of state.
Design concepts, such as reference architectures, deployment patterns, architectural patterns, tactics, and externally developed components, are the building blocks of design, and they form the foundation for architectural design as it is performed using ADD. As you will see in our step-by-step explanation of ADD in Chapter 3, some of the most important design decisions that an architect makes are how design concepts are selected, how they are instantiated, and how they are combined. Also, in Appendix A, we present a design concepts catalog that includes several instances of the design concepts presented here.
From these foundations, an architecture can be confidently and predictably constructed.