System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems, First Edition

Chapter 4 Form

4.1 Introduction

We begin Part 2 with Form. This chapter lays the groundwork for the analysis of architecture by first defining its most concrete aspect, form. We will discuss form as an idea, the organization of form by decomposition and hierarchy, and the representation of form. Establishing a clear understanding of form is the foundation for the analysis of architecture.

We begin Chapter 4 with a rigorous discussion of form in Sections 4.2 and 4.3 and then address formal relationships in Section 4.4. The context that surrounds the form of the system is described in Section 4.5. Section 4.6 reviews the main ideas of form again via an example of a software system, the bubblesort algorithm.

In each of the chapters in Part 2, we ...