Architecture and Design

As outsourcers we have developed architectures for many IT projects and as consultants have helped development teams brainstorm design issues to build effective and resilient architectures. Our approach is that Architecture contains all the really significant elements of the intended system. For a complex system a multi-view approach is necessary. Our architectures consist of many views, each describing the system form a different angle - functional, software, hardware, data, security, etc. We usually express design solutions in UML as part of the design model. We can use tools such as Rational Rose or simply document or diagram editors like MS Word and Visio (TM) depending on the size and complexity of the system.

The Views of Architecture

Each view presents a cohesive subset of some significant parts of the design model. Each view is an abstraction presenting only what is important from a specific viewpoint. The architecture also specifies the significant relationships between these views. More views can be added depending on the system.