Question

Software Design

Software designers take on a number of important roles including: software architect, enterprise architect, component designer, user interface designer, and system engineer. Which of these roles is most important to the success or failure of a project and why? Justify your answer.

Answer 1

Software Architecture

Architecture serves as a blueprint for a system. It provides an abstraction to manage the system complexity and establish a communication and coordination mechanism among components.

Further, it involves a set of significant decisions about the organization related to software development and each of these decisions can have a considerable impact on quality, maintainability, performance, and the overall success of the final product. These decisions comprise of −

• Architectural decisions align with business objectives.

• Architectural styles guide the organization.

• Selection of structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed.

• Behavior as specified in collaborations among those elements.

• Composition of these structural and behavioral elements into large subsystem.

It defines a structured solution to meet all the technical and operational requirements, while optimizing the common quality attributes like performance and security.

Enterprise architect.

Enterprise architecture, which we covered in a dedicated article, focuses on building complex enterprise ecosystems and solves high-level strategic issues. Enterprise architecture defines strategic directions of the business architecture, which then leads to an understanding of what technology facilities are needed to support that architecture.

Solution architect. Solution architecture (SA) is a complex process – with many sub-processes – that bridges the gap between business problems and technology solutions. It encompasses:

• Finding the best tech solution among all possible to solve the existing business problems.
• Describing the structure, characteristics, behavior, and other aspects of software to project stakeholders.
• Defining features, phases, and solution requirements.
• Providing specifications according to which the solution is defined, managed, and delivered.

Component Design:--

The Component Design Activity is an activity of the Product Design Activity for creating a Component Design. The Product Architecture identifies a set of Adaptable Components that may be used to implement a work product family. A Component Design is a design specification for one of these Adaptable Components. Application engineers, using the Generation Procedure, may adapt and compose a set of these components to implement certain work products, or portions thereof. Each component must be designed to satisfy relevant aspects of the Product Requirements and all design structures of the Product Architecture.

User interface designer:-------

User Interface (UI) Design is the link between users and your website. It includes the basic design elements that need to be present in order to for someone to navigate your site and make decisions. It is the ever-evolving relationship between a person and the system that they are using. It includes the way that your website interacts with users, the overall design and how information is presented. There are many different ways that you can look at user interface, but the basics always include the communication from a product to the user and vice versa. UI Design is all about structure, user manipulation and communication. This is one of the reasons it’s so important that you pay close attention to it. It is the basic building blocks of how your website is set up and functions when visited by your target audience. If it doesn’t go smoothly, problems tend to follow. Some of the elements involved in User Interface Design include the input controls, navigational components, informational components and containers. The devil is in the details, as they say. Buttons, lists, toggles, icons, breadcrumbs, tags and more also play a huge role. It is the way that you design your site from the back-end so that your audience can have a seamless, and enjoyable, front-end technology experience.

System engineering:-----

The aspiring professional or newcomer, everyone wants to know what is a Systems Engineer. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary turf of engineering and engineering management that centers around on how to design and manage composite systems over their life cycles. The systems engineer plays a vital role in the multi-dimensional computer world. Primarily they define the customer’s or stakeholder’s needs and essential functionality in the early stages of product or service development cycle.The top core skills for systems engineering are information security, integration, and security. Skills that differentiate professionals comprise of mathematics, application development, and systems software.