Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

Chapter 14. Planning the Architecture

This chapter looks at planning and modeling the conceptual architecture for the case study. The storyboards, requirements, and use cases presented in the previous chapter provided a good starting point for this activity. You have a good overview of the application functionality and if you've incorporated all the decision points in the inputs then it should be pretty well defined. Even with the limited information presented previously, I'm sure you're already thinking about how you would go about planning the architecture. It is a delicate situation at this point because you're armed with a reasonable amount of information and might be tempted to dive into the code and work it out as it goes along. In Chapter 25 we'll see some of the impacts of this approach. It is best to take a step back and think about how things will fit together into an overall picture. There'll still be much to do, but this chapter builds up a reasonable starting point for additional discussion and detailed design. The architecture (and the components) will provide a basis to start looking at how the patterns and practices can be applied to them. This chapter doesn't go into enormous detail; it simply examines how the architectural layers fit together and where the high-level components reside within them. The placement of components and their functionality will probably change as the design progresses and this is to be expected. Design is an iterative process and this ...