Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice

Chapter 2. Architectures in Context: The Reorientation of Software Engineering

The preceding chapter introduced the concept of software architecture and illustrated its power in establishing the contemporary World Wide Web. It also showed how software architecture provides a technical foundation for the exploitation of the notion of product families. This chapter shows how software architecture relates to the concepts of software engineering that traditionally are the most prominent.

What emerges from this consideration is a reorientation of those concepts away from their typical understanding, for the power of architecture demands a primacy of place. As a result the very character of key software engineering activities, such as requirements analysis and programming, are altered and the technical approaches taken during various software engineering activities are changed.

The focus of this chapter is showing the role of architecture in the whole of the software engineering enterprise, so it is somewhat cursory—most of the major topics of software engineering are discussed, but each individual topic is only allotted a few pages. Subsequent chapters will take up the major points in turn, treating them in substantial detail. The reader will be able to understand the role of software architecture in the larger development context, and could apply the ideas in broad terms, but without the specific techniques and tools covered in subsequent chapters effective application of the ideas will ...