Software Architect's Handbook

Summary

Software architecture design plays a critical part in the creation and success of software architectures. At its core, architecture design involves making design decisions to produce solutions to design problems. The result is an architecture design that can be validated, formally documented, and eventually used by development teams.

There are two main approaches to architecture design, the top-down and bottom-up approaches. We examined situations in which one would be used over the other and learned how a combination of the two approaches often works best.

Architectural drivers, which are the inputs into the architecture design process, guide the architecture design. They include design objectives, primary functional requirements, ...