How can you use software architecture to collaborate with developers more effectively?

2 Analysis of risks and impacts

Another benefit of software architecture is that it helps you to analyze the risks and impacts of the software system. By knowing the architecture of the software, you can identify the critical components, dependencies, and interfaces that may affect the quality, performance, and security of the software. You can also use software architecture to assess the impact of changes, updates, and new features on the existing system and determine the scope and priority of your testing.

5 Software architecture patterns

Software architecture patterns provide solutions to common problems and challenges in software design. Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a popular pattern that divides the software system into three components: model, view, and controller. The model manages the data and logic, the view displays the data and user interface, and the controller handles the user input and communication between the model and the view. This pattern is user-friendly and easy to test, but it is also complex, tightly coupled, and difficult to maintain. Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) is another pattern that consists of publishers and subscribers that communicate through events. The publishers publish events to a message broker, and the subscribers subscribe to the events they are interested in. This pattern is asynchronous, decoupled, and scalable but unreliable, inconsistent, and hard to debug. Lastly, Circuit Breaker pattern uses a circuit breaker to monitor and control the communication between components or services. This pattern is fault-tolerant, resilient, and responsive but complex, dependent, and requires configuration.

6 Software architecture principles

Finally, there are software architecture principles that define best practices and guidelines for software design. Separation of Concerns (SoC) is one such principle, which divides the software system into distinct and coherent parts that have a single responsibility and minimal dependencies. This improves modularity, readability, and testability. Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) is another principle that avoids duplication of code, data, and functionality to enhance reusability, maintainability, and quality. You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI) is the third principle that reduces complexity, cost, and waste by only implementing necessary features and functionality.