Architectural Design

Question 1

What are the different stakeholder viewpoints of:

Manager? Employees? Customers? Support staff? Anyone else?

Answer 1

• Manager; expects value for money
• Employee; helped in work, not hindered
• Customer; improved quality of service
• SUpport staff; ease of maintenance, sufficient resources
• Anyone Else; hope to be unaffected by the system

Question 2

What does an architect do? (6)

Answer 2

• Identify the different stakeholder concerns
• Prioritise the concerns by importance
• Determine logical influence of concerns on the system
• Investigates physical context of system
• Determines external constraints on its structure
• Decides high-level architectural design

Question 3

5 dfferent types of architectural concern?

Answer 3

• Physical
• Commercial
• Social
• Security
• logical

Question 4

What is meant by architecture?

Answer 4

High level design of a system determined by external constraints, user concerns and logical design

Question 5

What is the difference between systems architecture and software architecture?

Answer 5

Systems; driven by physical and external constraints

Software; driven by logical internal design policies

Question 6

Breifly Described a layered system architecture

Answer 6

logical separation of display, processing and data storage

horizonal layers with strong coupling between them

Question 7

Breifly Described a Partitioned system architecture

Answer 7

different business areas handled by separate subsystems

vertical partitions with weak coupling

Question 8

Breifly Described a Pipelined system architecture

Answer 8

Data transformations handled by separate subsystems

dataflows from one subsystem to the next

Question 9

Breifly Described a Transform centre system architecture

Answer 9

one controller subsystem manages all the others

Question 10

What are the 3 layers in a 3 tier architecture?

Answer 10

Presentation layer

Processing layer

Storage layer

Question 11

Whats the difference between open and closed architecture? Which is better?

Answer 11

closed (good) each layer talks only to neighbouring layer

open (bad) any layer talks to any other layer

Question 12

What are the 4 layers in 4 tier architecture?

Answer 12

User Interface (presentation)

Business rules (processing)
Business model (processing)

Persistent storage (storage)