Software Architecture : 5 Principles You Should Know
The architecture of any software project lays the foundation for success. Architecture defines technical standards, design, delivery, and support standards for a software product. When designing software architecture, a good Software development company keeps in mind the development and technology goals and ensures everything is logical, scalable, and cost-effective.
What is Software Architecture ?
The ability to view architecture from many different perspectives is a critical skill for an architect working in a software development company. Each perspective alone might not be enough, but when combined, they create a broader picture. The standpoints included in this category are principles, standards, patterns and anti-patterns, rules of thumb and empirical practices that are crucial for decision making in a particular direction and evaluating the success of the project.
In addition to understanding technical standards like platforms, technologies, and infrastructure, software architects play a key role in designing the architecture of a system. Ultimately, their analysis contributes directly to defining the product, perfecting the design, delivering the product on time, at an affordable price, and providing lifetime support. Therefore, a software development company has a firm grasp of the client’s technology goals and their business needs. A successful software project requires software architects to follow a number of basic guidelines, rules, and principles. In this article, we’ll discuss five key principles of software architecture that should never be overlooked.
1. SOLID Principles
A Software development company must follow a set of principles known as SOLID when working on Object-Oriented Programming System (OOPS) projects. Robert C. Martin introduced these five principles in his paper Design Principles and Design Patterns. They are essential to object-oriented design and architecture. The SOLID principles aim to make software design more understandable, boost scalability, and facilitate maintenance.
These are the underlying principles of SOLID:
- S- Single Responsibility Principle: Every module or class should only have responsibility for a single functionality. As outlined in the original principle, responsibility is a “reason to change,” and each class should have only one such reason.
- O- Open-Closed Principle: Basically, the open-closed principle states that all software entities should be open to enhancements and extensions without having to be modified or altered. The concept of polymorphism in OOPS is similar to this.
- L- Liskov Substitution Principle: Defining each derived class as a replacement for its base class is stated in this principle. The following example is given to make this concept understandable. An object of type A may be substituted for an object of type B if A is a subclass of B. In other words, it means that the software program’s objects can be replaced with examples of subtypes without interfering with the code.
- I- Interface Segregation Principle: Keeping this principle in mind is one of the most important things you can do to increase efficiency. According to it, existing interfaces should not be augmented by the addition of new methods. Each interface should cater to a particular client, and each class must implement several interfaces.
- D- Dependency Inversion Principle: According to this principle, high-level modules should never rely on low-level modules. Each module should be independent of the other. Also, abstractions should not rely on details, but details should be based on abstractions. Following this principle, one can introduce an interface abstraction to avoid dependencies between high-level and low-level modules.
Architecture a system is also guided by SOLID principles. SOLID combines all five principles to provide a scalable, adaptable, testable, and reusable software solution to the software development company.
2. The ‘Least’ Principles
To manage various aspects of software development projects, the software development company uses these principles to focus on least or minimalism philosophy. “Least” principles include the following:
- The Principle of Least Astonishment: According to this principle, when a sufficiently knowledgeable person encounters a solution or approach for the first time (the audience may vary, for example, end-users, programmers, testers, etc.), it should not surprise them. The principle, also known as the principle of least surprise, aims to reduce the learning curve used by users when using a module by leveraging existing knowledge. Hence, anything with a high level of unpredictability is a good candidate for re-design. Each element of the architecture is subject to it: from naming services to visualizations of user interfaces to the domain model.
- The Principle of Least Effort: This principle, commonly called Zipf’s Law, was developed to reflect basic human behavior: People tend to follow as effortless paths as possible. In other words, if a software development company follows a certain pattern in their design, the developers assigned to the project will follow the same pattern unless there is a significantly easier way to accomplish the task. Or, to take this a step further, once the current solution is satisfactory, it does not need to be improved immediately. Thus, putting the right architecture in place from the start is essential: it sets high expectations and ensures there will not be any quality compromises throughout the project’s lifecycle. One of the greatest benefits of this principle is that it can be applied to multiple systems: once we create the right design, we can build an architectural framework that serves as the basis for the next system we build. By establishing a future-proof template, we can guarantee success for the software systems of the software development company.
