Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition

The benefits of incremental development include a reduction of the potential risk in the project. If the architecture is for a family of related systems, the infrastructure can be reused across the family, lowering the per-system cost of each.

This practice gained attention in the early 2000s through the ideas of Alistair Cockburn and his notion of a “walking skeleton.” More recently, it has been adopted by those employing MVP (minimum viable product) as a strategy for risk reduction.

The fidelity of the system increases as extensions are added, or early versions are replaced by more complete versions of these parts of the software. In some cases, the parts may be low-fidelity versions or prototypes of the final functionality; in other cases, they may be surrogates that consume and produce data at the appropriate rates but do li... See more

Many systems are built as skeletal systems that can be extended using plug-ins, packages, or extensions. Examples include the R language, Visual Studio Code, and most web browsers.

Once an architecture has been defined, it can serve as the basis for incremental development. The first increment can be a skeletal system in which at least some of the infrastructure—how the elements initialize, communicate, share data, access resources, report errors, log activity, and so forth—is present, but much of the system’s application fun... See more

once the architecture has been agreed upon, it becomes very costly—for managerial and business reasons—to significantly modify it. This is one argument (among many) for analyzing the software architecture for a large system before settling on a specific choice.

If you want your implementation to conform to an architecture, then it must conform to the design decisions prescribed by the architecture. It must have the set of elements prescribed by the architecture, these elements must interact with each other in the fashion prescribed by the architecture, and each element must fulfill its responsibility to t... See more

Software architecture is a manifestation of the earliest design decisions about a system, and these early bindings carry enormous weight with respect to the system’s remaining development, its deployment, and its maintenance life. It is also the earliest point at which these important design decisions affecting the system can be scrutinized.

Architecture represents a common abstraction of a system that most, if not all, of the system’s stakeholders can use as a basis for creating mutual understanding, negotiating, forming consensus, and communicating with each other. The architecture—or at least parts of it—are sufficiently abstract that most nontechnical people can understand it to th... See more