What is a Software Architecture in Software Engineering: Benefits of Explicitly Designing and Documenting

Software Architecture Design in Software Engineering: Benefits of Explicitly Designing and Documenting

Ever come across the term “Software Architecture Design” in the context of software engineering?

This article aims to explore this topic along with the benefits of explicitly designing and documenting a software architecture from a software engineering or development standpoint.

Without further ado, let’s get right into it!

 

What is a Software Architecture Design?

A software architecture documentation is a description of the organisation of the software system that’s going to be developed. Thus, the architectural design helps with understanding the overall structure and how the software system is organised.

It serves as a link between the design of the system and its predetermined requirements. Additionally, it identifies the structural components within the system and the relationships between these components.

Software Architecture Design in Software Engineering: Benefits of Explicitly Designing and Documenting

 

With that said, there are a few benefits that motivate the software development team to explicitly design and document a software systems architecture:

 

Advantages of Explicitly Designing and Documenting a Software Architecture

1. Promotes Communication Between the Developers and Stakeholders

Firstly, an explicit design is helpful when communicating with stakeholders. A high-level presentation of the system architecture can be used during discussions amongst different stakeholders. This gives the stakeholders a visual representation of the system and helps with the elicitation and negotiation of system requirements. Overall, a software architecture design improves communication between the developer team and stakeholders.

Software Architecture Design in Software Engineering: Benefits of Explicitly Designing and Documenting

 

2. Useful for the System Analysis Process

Moving on, explicitly designing the software architecture is advantageous for the system analysis process. Especially at an early stage, the system development requires analysis. Thus, architecture design helps the development team determine whether the system is able to fulfil the requirements including performance, reliability and maintainability.

 

3. Promotes the Practice of Large-Scale Reuse in a System

Additionally, an explicit design can promote, validate and help in large-scale reuse within a system. This is because a system model is a compact and manageable description of the system organisation and the way the different components interact and intercommunicate.

Also, this system architecture is similar for different systems that possess similar requirements. Thus, certain parts of the architecture may be reusable across a range of different systems and types of products.

 

Conclusion

To recap, documentation of the system architecture can be very useful in the software development process as it provides a visual representation or description of the whole system. Thus, with the information of the software organisation, its structure and modules, the system architecture will certainly help developers in various ways, which includes, promoting communication, reviewing the system, and reusing large-scale structures within the system.

That being said, in this article, we explored the what is a software architecture design as well as the benefits of explicitly designing and documenting it.

With that said, we hope you’ve found this guide helpful in bolstering your understanding of software architecture design. Do comment down below if you have any questions or additional information regarding this topic.

Feel free to share this post with your fellow coders and software engineers!

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