Software Architecture and Quality

Article 1–1. Software Design and Structuring When I first read Barry Boehm’s “Software Design and Structuring” in the 1970s I sent it to my colleagues and said this article was fundamental to our work. Today I assign it to my students. It remains relevant today despite several sea changes in software engineering technology. Barry lays the foundation for software architecture as well as the framework for quantitative analysis in software engineering. In the second paragraph in this article, he explains the need for data-driven conclusions when he cites the analysis of 220 types of software errors and finds that “. . . if more time had been spent on validating the design . . . prior to coding many of the conceptual errors would not have been committed to code.” This finding is as true today as it was in 1975 and is only one of the many seminal ideas supported by data that Barry promoted. Barry explains the application domains for bottom-up, top-down, and structured programming. The analysis approach explained in the article’s appendix is a landmark use of risk analysis applied to software engineering tradeoffs. This approach can be found in most reputable software engineering textbooks. Barry anticipates the current software engineering enthusiasm for model-driven design in this article, including the idea of continuous user involvement, a tenet of modern agile methods. He anticipates the Unified Modeling Language that is now the lingua franca of software architecture, but he wisely avoids advocating for automatic code generation, long a software engineering dream that so far has become a nightmare. Software architects must read and understand Barry’s findings, including the appendix, and apply them to their current and future software projects. Anything less is malpractice.