Thesis chapter 2.2: Architecture

Architecture is defined as "the fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution."
The architecture is an enabler to achieve certain system qualities, or non-functional properties, and many organisation view their architecture as a strategic technology asset.

An important part in designing an architecture is to identify the organisation or structure of the software and systems parts necessary for the desired qualities. If a certain design or style is used consistent throughout the design of the system it can be considered an architectural pattern. However there are reports that quality attributes are of less importance to users or customers, and this suggest that identifying and delivering competitive features may be more critical to business competitiveness.

Many systems are built on available platforms or frameworks, such as .NET for Microsoft Windows applications, Android for mobile phones or AUTOSAR\footnote for automotive software. The choice of platform constraints the design choices, but also decreases the development effort, at least in theory, and allows software to conform to explicit or implicit domain standards. The challenge for the OEM is to tailor the applications built on top of these platforms to a competitive product. In a sense these types of platforms constitute a reference architecture for a specific product or system architecture.

In this thesis a reference architecture (RA) captures the design ideas and patterns that permeates the architecture with a focus on the design decisions that have great impact on the product family as a whole, i.e. the reference architecture is a template for a specific product or system architecture
This definition of an RA is what is categorised as a ``non-structured reference architecture'' according to Angelov et al., and thus falls outside of their five types of structured RA.

An RA and a product architecture differs, among many other aspects, in that the reference architecture dictates the patterns and principles to implement, i.e. what the design should be,  while the product architecture instead captures the instance of the reference architecture with deviations meeting various constraints, i.e. what the design is. Another difference between an RA and a product architecture is that the latter gives a coherent view of the product(s) in a project, possible to track the status of.