A beautiful architecture

It’s hard to define “architecture” when we talk about software development. Even more, for undergraduate students (including me)  it’s hard to fully understand what software architecture is and what is its relevance. One of my professors, Ken Bauer, said that it’s particularly hard to explain it to students since their lack of experience, and I’ve noticed that in many university syllabuses the topics on software planning, design and architecture are  almost none. This is a serious problems since a software engineer is supposed to be someone capable of design well structured software and not just a well-trained technician.

Anyways, Bauer himself  recommended us many books in his class, and stressed some of them as “must have” for any software engineer. I bought some of those books and they’re really awesome. In “Beautiful Architecture” there are a lot of great essays by many of the industry gurus, and I’d like to post one of the best analogies I found to explain what software architecture is and how it behaves.

Music Composition and Software Architecture

Whereas building architecture is often used as an analogy for software architecture, music composition may be a better analogy. A building architect creates a static description (blueprints and other drawings) of a relatively static structure (the architecture must account for movement of people and services within the building as well as the load-bearing structure). In music composition and software design, the composer (software architect) creates a static description of a piece of music (architecture description and code) that is later performed (executed) many times. In both music and software the design can account for many components interacting to produce the desired result, and the result varies depending on the performers, the environment in which it is performed, and the interpretation imposed by the performers.

This is part of the first chapter of ”Beautiful Architecture” by John Klein and David Weiss.