software architecture

When production code is important, then it is a minority: most project code is scaffolding. Tests, deployments, linting, verification, utilities for local development, handy admin interfaces–scaffolding is code that helps us safely and efficiently change production code.

The software development community is coming to grips with the fact that roughly 80 percent of a typical software system’s total cost occurs after initial deployment. Most systems that people work on are in this phase. Many programmers and software designers never get to work on new development—they work under the constraints of the existing archit... See more

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 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 point follows from the previous two: Architecture not only imbues systems with qualities, but does so in a predictable way.

Every architecture, no matter what it is, partitions possible changes into three categories: local, nonlocal, and architectural.

• A local change can be accomplished by modifying a single element—for example, adding a new business rule to a pricing logic module.


• A nonlocal change requires multiple element modifications but leaves the underlying archite

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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