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Enduring Ideas in the Realm of Software

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Design

What Is Application Architecture?

kevindooley Software architecture is often defined as the structure or structures of a system.  There’s been a lot of attempts to define architecture from a software perspective and lots of debates over the years.  Rather than start from scratch, I thought it would be more helpful to highlight some of the more useful definitions that …

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Scenario and Feature Frame

A Scenario and Feature Frame is a quick way to show your project’s incremental value and dependencies.  It’s helpful for showing your management what you’ll deliver in terms of a baseline release.  It’s helpful for you in terms of finding ways to reduce dependencies.  If you have a bunch of scenarios that depend on certain …

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What’s a Scenario

Photo by Wonderlane What’s a scenario?  Not everybody uses the term “scenario” the same way.  In the software industry, there’s three common usages of scenario: The same as a use case. A path through a use case. An instance of a use case. Usually, the most helpful one is “an instance of a use case.”  …

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What is Systems Architecture

Photo by Wolfgang Staudt What is systems architecture and why do we care?  A systems architecture supports the highest layers of the enterprise architecture and it helps keep the enterprise architecture aligned to the business.  In A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture (Coad Series), James McGovern, Scott W. Ambler, Michael E. Stevens, James Linn, Vikas …

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Conceptual Architecture View, Module View, Execution View, and Code View

How do you represent a software architecture?  You can use a set of viewpoints including a conceptual architecture view, module view, execution view, and code view.  This set of architectural viewpoints was originally proposed by Hofmeister, Nord, and Soni in their book Applied Software Architecture.  In A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture (Coad Series), James …

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