Role of Architecture & Planning in any software application development!

What is the most important part of Software Product Development? Every software development project goes through a number of phases from concept finalization, requirement analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. But there’s one crucial step in the process that can make or break the success of any application, it is architecture planning

What is Software Architecture?

Software Architecture is the elaborate structure and architectural description of a specific solution. It lays down the specifications for which the solution is defined, delivered, managed and operated. It describes the structure, characteristics, and behavior of a solution to its stakeholders. Before any coding begins, it’s vital to thoroughly plan out software architecture in which both front-end and back-end developers will collaborate on during design, and prior to development, to ensure that the software/solution we are going to build is stable, flexible and scalable from the start.

Who is a Solution Architect?

A Solution Architect provides the strategic direction for the project. He understands both business and technical requirements of the project, compares tools and techniques and suggests the ones that best serve the requirements of a project.

Characteristics of Software Architect

• A good solution architecture will take care of meeting the non-technical and non-functional requirements.
• It should be strong and easy to maintain when we find bugs.
• It should be flexible, extensible, and usable on the long term.
• It should make it possible to adapt to requirements.
• It needs high-capacity scalability.
• Refactoring should be easy.
• It should respond positively to change; when adding features, performance should not decrease.
• Maintainance should be made easy.

Different type of design patterns in  software Architecture

MVC, MVP, and MVVM are three most popular Architecture design patterns. Where MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, MVP for Model-View-Presenter and MVVM means Model-View-ViewModel.

MVC design pattern is one of the oldest patterns available for achieving the separation of concerns. It impels a bifurcation of concerns, which means domain model and controller logic are separated from the user interface (view). As a result maintenance and testing of the application becomes simple and easy. MVC design pattern divides an application into three major aspects: Model, View, and Controller.

An MVP system is an evolved version of MVC wherein the controller is replaced by the presenter. The presenter is also responsible for updating the view with the new data generated by the model. This pattern divides an application into three major aspects: Model, View, and Presenter.

MVVM pattern supports two-way data binding between View and ViewModel. This allows automatic propagation of changes, inside the state of ViewModel to the View.

Today, the MVC pattern is used by well-known frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Apple iOS Development, Android development, ASP.NET MVC, etc. While MVP is mostly used for ASP.NET Web Forms applications and MVVM is used by WPF, Caliburn, Silverlight, nRoute,

The conclusion is Solution Architecture is very important in product /application /software development. Thus choosing the right company which will help you in planning the best architecture is very important.