De Architectura

• Durability the building should last for a long time without falling down on the people inside it.
• Utility the building should be useful for the people living in it
• Beauty the building should look good and raise the spirits of its inhabitants

Vitruvio, 23BC

The Art and Science of Building

• Architects are not concerned with the creation of building technologies and materials—making glass with better thermal qualities or stronger concrete.
• Architects are concerned with how building materials can be put together in desirable ways to achieve a building suited to its purpose.
• The design process that assembles the parts into a useful, pleasing (hopefully) and cost-effective (sometime) whole that is called “architecture”.

Architecting, the planning and building of structures, is as old as human societies – and as modern as the exploration of the solar system

Eberhardt Rechtin, 1991

Forces

Small

One Person can build it

• Minimal planning
• Basic tools
• Simple process

Medium

An experienced team can build it

• Modeling plans
• Power tools
• Well-defined process

Large

Do not try this without an architect

Context

Why Software Architecture?

1. Manage complexity through abstraction
2. Communicate, remember and share global design decisions among the team
3. Visualize and represent relevant aspects (structure, behavior, deployment, …) of a software system
4. Understand, predict and control how the design impacts quality attributes of a system
5. Define a flexible foundation for the maintenance and future evolution of the system

Final Presentation

The Architecture of Open Source Software Systems

1. Everyone is assigned a different system
2. Gather information about it (starting from *)
3. Give a presentation about its architecture during the second part of the semester

*Amy Brown and Greg Wilson (eds.) The Architecture of Open Source Applications, 2012

Textbook

Richard N. Taylor, Nenad Medvidovic, Eric M. Dashofy, Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory and Practice, John-Wiley, January 2009, ISBN 9780470167748

References

• George Fairbanks, Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk Driven Approach, M&B 2010
• Eberhardt Rechtin, Systems Architecting: Creating and Building Complex Systems, Prentice Hall 1991
• Henry Petroski, Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design, Vintage 2004
• Ian Gordon, Essential Software Architecture, Springer 2004
• Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press 1979
• Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, Penguin 1987
• Amy Brown and Greg Wilson (eds.) The Architecture of Open Source Applications, 2012