4.2 Architectural design

Architectural design involves understanding the issues that affect the architecture of your particular product and creating a description of the architecture that shows the critical components and some of their relationships. The architectural issues that are most important for software product development are shown in Figure 4.4 and Table 4.4.

A star diagram represents the five issues that influence architectural decisions. These are Non-functional product characteristics, Product lifetime, Software reuse, Number of users, and Software compatibility.

Figure 4.4

Issues that influence architectural decisions

Table 4.4 The importance of architectural design issues

Issue

Architectural importance

Non-functional product characteristics

Non-functional product characteristics such as security and performance affect all ...

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