Bulldozer00's Blog

Out of the bazillions of definitions of “software architecture” out in the wild, my favorite is:

“the initial set of decisions that are costly to change downstream“.

It’s my fave because it encompasses the “whole” product development ecosystem and not just the structure and behavior of  the product itself. Here are some example decisions that come to mind:

• Programming language(s)
• Third party libraries
• Architectural pattern/style
• Build system selection
• Targeted operating system(s)
• Version control system
• Automated testing framework
• Communication middleware
• GUI framework
• Requirements management tool
• Non-functional requirements (latency, throughput, availability, security, safety)
• Development process

Once your production code gets intimately bound with the set of items on the list, there comes a point of no return on the project timeline where changing any of them is pragmatically impossible. Once this mysterious time threshold is crossed, changing the product source code may be easier than changing anything else on the list.

Got any other items to add to the list?