Glossary Definitions Of System Architecture

System Architecture can be defined as the set of principal design decisions taken for a system. Design decisions can be recorded once they have been made. They are captured in models, and the process of creating these models called modeling.
System architecture, as defined by (Bass, Clements, & Kazman, 2003), is a means for describing the elements and interactions of a complete system including its hardware and software elements. It is mainly concerned with the elements of the system and their contribution toward the system’s goal but not with their substructures.
Software architectures, as defined by (Eftekhari, Poyan Rad, & Hamid, 2011, p. 1251), provide a high-level of abstraction in the form of coarse-grained processing, connecting, data

There exist a number of definitions of software architecture with minor differences depending on domain and authors’ experiences. However, most definitions share common characteristics.
The following list referenced definitions that have been addressed for software architecture:
1. Provide a high-level of abstraction in the form of coarse-grained processing, connecting, data elements, their interfaces, and their configurations (Eftekhari, Poyan Rad, & Hamid, 2011).
2. The software architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them (Bass, Clements, & Kazman, 2003).
3. 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 (Maier, Emery, & Hilliard,

The structure of the components of a program/system, their interrelationships, and principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time. In other words, software architecture is "the structure of the components of a program/system, their interrelationships, and principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time (Garlan & Perry, Software Architecture: Editorial, 1995).
5. Software system architecture comprises (Boehm, Gacek, Abd-Allah, & Clark, 1995):
• A collection of software and system components, connections, and constraints.
• A collection of system stakeholders' need statements.
• A rationale which demonstrates that the components, connections, and constraints define a system that, if implemented, would satisfy the collection of system stakeholders' need statements.
6. Software architecture has at least four distinct incarnations: Within each category, the structures describe the system from a different perspective (Hofmeister, Soni, & Nord, 1995):
• The conceptual architecture describes the system in terms of its major design elements and the relationships among them.
• The module interconnection architecture encompasses two orthogonal structures: functional decomposition and