Developing Information Systems

10     SOLUTION-RELATED ARCHITECTURES

Julian Cox

CONTENTS OF THIS CHAPTER

This chapter covers the following topics:

• what is architecture?
• architecture patterns;
• enterprise architecture;
• solution architecture;
• software architecture;
• stakeholders and roles in architecture;
• architecture management;
• references and further reading.

INTRODUCTION

Anything that we can classify as a system has an architecture, including buildings, living organisms (including humans), organisations, complex enterprise IT systems, software applications and individual components of those. When referring to IT systems, a core definition of what is meant by the term ‘architecture’ is provided by the ISO/IEC 42010:2011¹ ‘Systems and software engineering – Architecture description’ ...