Architecture: First Steps

How do business requirements dictate architectural decisions? Lets understand this through a quick and small example. Assume that a software company, Takshila Inc., has recently bagged the contract for building a new inventory management system for a local cosmetics manufacturing firm. After the initial talks with the stakeholders, the business analyst from Takshila comes up with high-level specifications, which are:

With these requirements in mind, and after detailed discussions with team members, the software architect has come up with the following architectural specifications for the proposed inventory management software:

Note how the business requirements have been translated into architectural specifications, and still there is not a word about a programming or development platform! So the architecture has nothing to do with development platforms, programming languages, design and so on. We can create a system satisfying the above requirements in many ways, using different designs and probably using different platforms too (for example, one could either use ASP.NET or JSP/J2EE). In short, the architecture does not care whether you use LINQ, AJAX, or Ruby on Rails. As long as you are meeting the architectural specifications, you are free to choose your own technology and tools.