Software architectures shift the focus of developers from lines-of-cod — Software architecture

"As the size of software systems increases, the algorithms and data structures of the computation no longer constitute the major design problems. When systems are constructed from many components, the organization of the overall system—the software architecture—presents a new set of design problems. This level of design has been addressed in a number of ways including informal diagrams and descriptive terms, module interconnection languages, templates and frameworks for systems that serve the needs of specific domains, and formal models of component integration mechanisms."

"Software architecture is a burgeoning field of research and practice within software engineering. Alternatively, to be more precise, the architecture of large, software intensive systems has been the subject of increasing interest for the past decade. What accounts for this surge of interest in a field that, until about 1990 was unheard of? To begin, the field did not spontaneously create itself in 1990. However, that time frame was when the term “software architecture” began to gain widespread acceptance and when the field first attracted substantial attention from both industry and the research community. The field was created out of necessity. Software systems were growing larger: systems of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code were becoming commonplace. Clearly, Parnas, Brooks, Dijkstra and others in the 1960s through the 1980s-laid the foundations of the ideas underlying the field that is today called “software architecture” but what changed is that by the 1990s such large systems were becoming common."

"Software architecture is foundational to the development of large, practical software-intensive applications."

"Software architecture is a relatively young discipline. There is as much confusion in it as there is excitement. In the literature one finds far too many perspectives, approaches, methodologies, frameworks, techniques and tricks."

"Studies of software engineering projects show that a large number of usability related change requests are made after its deployment. Fixing usability problems during the later stages of development often proves to be costly, since many of the necessary changes require changes to the system that cannot be easily accommodated by its software architecture. These high costs prevent developers from meeting all the usability requirements, resulting in systems with less than optimal usability. The successful development of a usable software system therefore must include creating a software architecture that supports the right level of usability. Unfortunately, no documented evidence exists of architecture level assessment techniques focusing on usability. To support software architects in creating a software architecture that supports usability, we present a scenario based assessment technique that has been successfully applied in several cases. Explicit evaluation of usability during architectural design may reduce the risk of building a system that fails to meet its usability requirements and may prevent high costs incurring adaptive maintenance activities once the system has been implemented."

"Software architecture is an important field of study that is becoming more important and more talked about with every passing day. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, there exists little practical guidance on managing software architecture in a real software development organization, from both technical and managerial perspectives. This book has emerged from our belief that the coupling of a systems software architecture and its business and organizational context has not been well explored. Our experience with designing and analyzing large and complex software-intensive systems has led us to recognize the role of business and organization in the design of the system and in its ultimate success or failure. Systems are built to satisfy an organizations requirements (or assumed requirements in the case of shrink-wrapped products). These requirements dictate the systems performance, availability, security, compatibility with other systems, and the ability to accommodate change over its lifetime. The desire to satisfy these goals with software that has the requisite properties influences the design choices made by a software architect."