Beautiful Architecture

Architectural Structures

How, then, does a good architect deal with these concerns? We have already mentioned the need to organize the system into structures, each defining specific relationships among certain types of components. The architect’s chief focus is to organize the system so that each structure helps answer the defining questions for one of the concerns. Key structural decisions divide the product into components and define the relationships among those components (Bass, Clements, and Kazman 2003; Booch, Rumbaugh, and Jacobson 1999; IEEE 2000; Garlan and Perry 1995). For any given product, there are many structures that need to be designed. Each must be designed separately so that it is viewed as a separate concern. In the next few sections we discuss some structures that you can use to address the concerns on our list. For example, the Information Hiding Structures show how the system is organized into work assignments. They can also be used as a roadmap for change, showing for proposed changes which modules accommodate those changes. For each structure we describe the components and the relations among them that define the structure. Given the concerns on our list, we consider the following structures to be of primary importance.

The Information Hiding Structures

components and relations: The primary components are Information Hiding Modules, where each module is a work assignment for a group of developers, and each module embodies a design decision. We say that a design ...