The benefits of good architectural style in the engineering of computer based systems

The paper considers some of the problems of developing large computer based systems and argues that many of these problems can be eased by adopting a good architecture. The term architecture is frequently used in the context of computer based system (CBS) development, but there are almost as many definitions of it as there are uses. Therefore a definition is derived from its use in English and then expanded to determine the benefits which a good architecture applied right from the beginning of development is capable of delivering when compared with conventional approaches where architectural considerations are only considered at the back end of the development and mainly confined to considerations of hardware configuration. This leads to the definition of a set of general properties for a CBS architecture which can be used as a basis for comparing architectural approaches. Finally, the specific properties of these characteristics which qualify an architecture as "good" are developed and two architectures which satisfy these conditions are briefly described.