Software architecture

Software planning and design was not something we gave the importance it has when we started programming, creating and developing small projects for our courses. It was only when we started making greater projects that we became aware of one of the statements the chapters make: having a mess spaghetti or subway-like it’s going to make it hard for you to know what you did, how to fix an error, where it was or to add more functionality.

What I take from the lecture, besides the types of software architecture and how it resembles pasta, is how awfully important it is to plan and create a design in the early stages of how your project is going to be implemented to have clarity and help the detection of errors or lack of requirement fulfillments. Just what happened to us last semester when we had to redesign the whole project midway into the semester. Still I had not come up with the term software architecture and if it was not for that lecture, I still would be confusing it with other phases of software engineering.

It left me quite impressed how you can choose what to get into details during the architecture design and that it depended on what was the main goal and requirements of the project. Another thing I did not expect to be that important but came up in an extra block of the lecture was the relationship with marketing. Although it is not presented as something of death or life of a matter, I still found it important, so your architecture can reflect what is important for your client to express and so you keep it in mind and present it to them and even to the public later on, when you are trying to sell it. I will keep these three aspects: the different types of architecture depending on your needs, the importance of having an architecture and the relationship with marketing, as something I had not expected but consider quite helpful in order to achieve my project goals.