When developing applications, it is important to consider how they will be served in the future. You should think about the features of adding changes and editing functionality. In addition, it is important to understand how external interface elements interact with internal processes and how users will interact with the program. This is where software architecture helps. Let’s take a look at what it is, how it works, and why it is needed.
What is Software Architecture?
The software development architecture is the developed structure of the program, which includes the definition of the interaction of interface components with the internal processes of the program. Simply put, this approach determines which functions are responsible for what and how they interact with each other.
There is no exact understanding and clear formulation of this process. The main task is to create a logical structure for the program and simplify the interaction between developers. This makes it possible to change the program in the future, working on specific aspects and not redoing all the software. Software architecture and design assure that an application will perform its tasks and follow its intended purpose, as identified during the initial stages of development.
The main idea of the architecture is to reduce the complexity of the perception of the system by delimiting powers and creating a clear structure. The architecture and design of the software allow you to create a clear structure convenient for programmers to work with. Its quality determines how easy it will be to maintain the software, its changes, additions, and support.
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Why software architecture is needed?
The software solution architecture performs several important tasks:
- determines the structure of the program and allows you to understand how it works, and at what levels certain tasks and functions are performed;
- defines the behavior and interaction of elements, thanks to which it becomes clear what happens if a certain action is performed;
- determines significant and secondary elements, which allows you to estimate the cost of development, understand which elements are mandatory to implement, and which can be abandoned in favor of economic considerations;
- helps to understand how scalable the program is, how difficult it will be to implement new features and what technology stack to use.
These are the main tasks that software architecture performs. Its implementation allows you to significantly simplify development, clearly understand what will happen in the end, and how all functions will work. The architecture of a software project allows you to make high-quality software and further reduces the cost of maintaining and maintaining it.
Challenges of software architecture
At the beginning of any project, many architectural decisions are made: how to store data, which programming language to choose, and which framework? But it is also important to understand what can still be changed in the early stages of a project. And only over time, these solutions become a real architecture that is difficult to change.
From this position, not all initial decisions will seem so straightforward architectural. For example, choosing a programming language is clearly an architectural decision because changing it is almost tantamount to rewriting the project from scratch. And choosing a key-value database is not a very fundamental decision since there are many similar databases, and you can replace one with another much more easily and inconspicuously. Doing this before the project’s release in production is not at all difficult.
Often, borrowed software solutions are much easier to change than their own developments. This happens because the borrowed software knows absolutely nothing about your personal goals and objectives. It solves problems common to the entire software community, which have been solved more than once, and similarly: changing one hosting to another will be incomparably easier than changing the data structure you created.
Creating an architecture from your own code in long-term projects is very important and, therefore, is extremely challenging.