Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition

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Designing an Architecture

With Humberto Cervantes

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Design—including architectural design—is a complex activity to perform. It involves making a myriad of decisions that take into account many aspects of a system. In the past, this task was only entrusted to senior software engineers—gurus—with decades of hard-won experience. A systematic method provides guidance in performing this complex activity so that it can be learned and capably performed by mere mortals.

In this chapter, we provide a detailed discussion of a method—Attribute-Driven Design (ADD)—that allows an architecture to be designed ...