Software Architect's Handbook

Assisting the development team

Documentation is useful to the team during the design and development of the software system. Learning about the structures and elements of the architecture and how they interact with each other will allow developers to understand how they should be implementing their functionality. By seeing the interfaces available, developers will gain an understanding as to what needs to be implemented and what is available to use in completed implementations. The documentation enables developers to complete their work in a way that abides by the design decisions that have been made for the architecture.

Software architecture also restricts some of the design choices available to developers and puts constraints on implementation, ...