Quotes About Structure

If we tried to design the component dependency structure before we designed any classes, we would likely fail rather badly. We would not know much about common closure, we would be unaware of any reusable elements, and we would almost certainly create components that produced dependency cycles. Thus the component dependency structure grows and evolves with the logical design of the system.

When you look at the top-level directory structure, and the source files in the highest-level package, do they scream "Health Care System," or "Accounting System," or "Inventory Management System"? Or do they scream "Rails," or "Spring/Hibernate," or "ASP"?

The web is a delivery mechanism—an IO device—and your application architecture should treat it as such. The fact that your application is delivered over the web is a detail and should not dominate your system structure. Indeed, the decision that your application will be delivered over the web is one that you should defer. Your system architecture should be as ignorant as possible about how it will be delivered.

a good architecture must support: • The use cases and operation of the system. • The maintenance of the system. • The development of the system. • The deployment of the system.

A shopping cart application with a good architecture will look like a shopping cart application. The use cases of that system will be plainly visible within the structure of that system. Developers will not have to hunt for behaviors, because those behaviors will be first-class elements visible at the top level of the system.

So what does the architecture of your application scream? When you look at the top-level directory structure, and the source files in the highest-level package, do they scream "Health Care System," or "Accounting System," or "Inventory Management System"? Or do they scream "Rails," or "Spring/Hibernate," or "ASP"?

Every software system provides two different values to the stakeholders: behavior and structure. Software developers are responsible for ensuring that both those values remain high. Unfortunately, they often focus on one to the exclusion of the other.

The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable — not to ensure that the house is made of bricks.

Software architects are, by virtue of their job description, more focused on the structure of the system than on its features and functions. Architects create an architecture that allows those features and functions to be easily developed, easily modified, and easily extended.

structured programming, object-orient programming, and functional programming.

Structured programming imposes discipline on direct transfer of control.

Object-oriented programming imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control.

Functional programming imposes discipline upon assignment.

Dependent Functions. If one function calls another, they should be vertically close, and the caller should be above the callee, if at all possible.

Notice how well those three align with the three big concerns of architecture: function, separation of components, and data management.

What do we talk about when we talk about architecture?

Structured programming forces us to recursively decompose a program into a set of small provable functions. We can then use tests to try to prove those small provable functions incorrect. If such tests fail to prove incorrectness, then we deem the functions to be correct enough for our purposes.

Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure

Implementing the policy of national-territorial autonomy was one of the chief tasks of Narkomnats. To that end the commissariat was structured along national lines. Polish, Byelorussian, Latvian, Jewish, Armenian, and Moslem national commissariats were created within it, and national sections were set up to concern themselves with such smaller national groups on Russian territory as the Estonians, the Germans, the Kirghiz, the Kalmyks, and the mountain tribes of the Caucasus.

The party-state structure still showed considerable looseness in organization and mode of functioning.

You may have brilliant ideas, you may be able to invent unbeatable strategies—but if the group that you lead, and that you depend on to execute your plans, is unresponsive and uncreative, and if its members always put their personal agendas first, your ideas will mean nothing. You must learn the lesson of war: it is the structure of the army—the chain of command and the relationship of the parts to the whole—that will give your strategies force.

This military model is extremely adaptable to any group. It has one simple requirement: before formulating a strategy or taking action, understand the structure of your group. You can always change it and redesign it to fit your purposes.

Everything in nature has a structure, a way that the parts relate to one another, which is generally fluid and not so easy to conceptualize.

the likeness was stricking. Not exact, of course - no man ever looks exactly like his father - but there was something there, no doubt about it, even with the younger man's beard and straggling hair. Something in the cast of the eyes and the bone structure, perhaps, or in the play of the expression: a kind of ponderous agility, a genetic shadow that was beyond the skills of any actor.