Software Architecture in Industrial Applications

To help us identify and focus on pragmatic and concrete issues related to the role of software architecture in large systems, we conducted a survey of a variety of software systems used in industrial applications. Our premise, which guided the examination of these systems, was that software architecture is concerned with capturing the structures of a system and the relationships among the elements both within and between structures. The structures we found fell into several broad categories: conceptual architecture, module interconnection architecture, code architecture, and execution architecture. These categories address different engineering concerns. The separation of such concerns, combined with specialized implementation techniques, decreased the complexity of implementation, and improved reuse and reconfiguration.