Software Architecture report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Software Architecture report - Essay Example This level of abstraction is called software architectural styles or patterns. These styles and patterns synonymously refer to a composition and arrangement of components and the way of interaction between these components (Bass, Clements, & Kazman, 2003, Section 5.9). This arrangement is in actual a generalization of the best practices adopted in specific problems. By identifying the style or pattern involved in a particular architecture, the software architects can immediately understand the basic working model of the intended system. Software architecture is a formal arrangement of integral elements/components of a system while architectural style or pattern is a generalization of the best practice solution that can be applied in a particular scenario. It represents of a  set of principles that provide an abstract framework of components, their types (whether a repository of computational component, etc.) their layout and relationships (e.g. input and output dependencies) and interaction mechanisms (e.g. events based, procedure calls, etc.) that all systems falling into a similar category can follow. Thus, architectural styles or patterns aid in partitioning a system and facilitate in reusing the pre-existing solution designs to solve the frequently occurring similar system formulation problems (Garland & Anthony, 2003, p. 171; Gomaa, 2011, p. 198). The problem and context of the selected architectural components aid in selecting a particular architectural style characterizing components and connectors (Gomaa, 2011, p. 205). In a style or pattern, components could be computational, memory related, managerial or a controller while the connector depicting interaction mechanisms between components could be procedure call, data flow, implicit invocation, message passing, shared data or instantiation. Section 2.1 to 2.10 provides a brief description of a few architectural styles and patterns (Taylor, Medvidovic, &