One of the recurring questions I get asked whenever I talk to teams about software architecture is how it relates to techniques such as TDD, BDD, DDD, RDD, etc. The question really relates to whether xDD is a substitute for "software architecture". The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that the process of thinking about software architecture is really about putting some boundaries in place, inside which you can build your software using whatever xDD practices/principles you like.

For me, the "why?" is simple - you need to think about the things that play a huge part in influencing the resulting software architecture that you come up with, including:

• Functional requirements: As Tom Gilb says in pretty much all of his software architecture talks, requirements drive architecture. You need to know vaguely what you're building, irrespective of how you capture and record those requirements (i.e. user stories, use cases, requirements specifications, acceptance tests, etc).
• Quality attributes: The non-functional requirements (e.g. performance, scalability, security, etc) are usually technical in nature and are hard to retrofit. They ideally need to be baked into the initial design and ignoring these qualities will lead you to a software system that is either over- or under-engineered.
• Constraints: The real-world usually has constraints; ranging from approved technology lists, prescribed integration standards, target deployment environment, size of team, etc. Again, not considering these could cause you to deliver a software system that doesn't complement your environment, adding unnecessary friction.
• Principles: These are the things that you want to adopt in an attempt to provide consistency and clarity to the software. From a design perspective, this includes things like your decomposition strategy (e.g. layers vs components vs micro-services), separation of concerns, architectural patterns, etc. Explicitly outlining a starting set of principles is essential so that the team building the software starts out heading in the same direction.

Considering these important elements needn't take very long and can provide you with a starting point for the rest of the software design activities. Of course, this doesn't mean that the architecture shouldn't be changed, especially when you start writing code and getting feedback. The point is that you now have a framework and some boundaries to work within, which provide some often needed vision and guidance for the team. My experience suggests that a little direction can go a long way.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 19 February 2014 09:40:00 GMT #