Architecture
Civil Architecture vs Software Architecture
First of all, let’s begin with some basic concepts:
In the past, there was a clear distinction between civil engineering and architecture. But, today, civil engineering and architecture are synonymous. Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment.
There are so many meanings of what is Software architecture, large institutes like IEEE, SEI, and others express their own concepts in their own terms.
I like this one:
Software architecture refers to the fundamental structures of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems.
Repetitive problems
Let’s talk now about how these engineers evolve through their repetitive problems.
In Civil Architecture, when you need to build a bridge every architect had their own equations and solutions, this changes when they share your experiences wins, fails, losses; this produces standards and patterns.
Now, when an architect needs to build a bridge the first thing they do is to look at the pattern and change their own inputs to achieve a model that will be effective.
The same happens in the software, repetitive problems come in different projects and similar solutions were founds, but when you share your experiences, successes, and failures, the software patterns come out.
Now, when an architect needs to build a software platform, in order to take advantage of each platform the first thing they should do is look at the software pattern, in this case, the bridged pattern, to ensure that their problems will be resolved for sure.
Blueprints
A Blueprint is a guide for making something. Express how a topic going to be resolved or has been resolved.
In Civil architecture are these:
- Electrical blueprint
- Structural blueprint
- Pipe blueprint
- etc
In Software architecture are:
- Class Diagrams
- Data Model
- Sequence Diagram
- Deployment Diagram
- etc
(For a brief recap about the UML diagrams check this out.)
Conclusions
- Civil architecture has had many years of evolution to achieve its goals with quality and effectiveness.
- The role of the architect is relevant in Civil architecture because he or she can express a vision of how and why their models can resolve problems.
- The concepts expressed in civil architecture have been adapted to the software architecture and this helped to improve software projects on an enterprise scale.
