Primacy of Place: The Reorientation of Software Engineering Demanded by Software Architecture

Abstract

Software architecture is a powerful technology that has proven itself in numerous domains. It has been used, for example, to shape the contemporary World Wide Web and has provided the basis for the economic exploitation of the notion of product families. In far too many development organizations, however, consideration of software architecture is relegated to a specific time-period, or phase, of software development. This talk considers how software architecture relates to the classical conceptions of software development. What emerges is a substantial reorientation of software engineering, for the power of architecture demands a primacy of place. With architecture as a central focus the very character of key software engineering activities, such as requirements analysis and programming, are altered and the technical approaches taken during development activities are necessarily changed.