Retrospection and Perspectives on Pragmatic Software Architecture Design: An Industrial Report

摘要

It is commonly recognized that the research on software architecture has enjoyed a golden age of innovation and concept formulation, and began to enter the mature stage of utilization. It is a natural expectation at present that the relevant concepts and methods have been populated and the improvements have been achieved in practice. In this paper, we give a retrospective report on our extensive architecture design of a large scale mission-critical system conducted in our company. The project has been trying to incorporate newly proposed concepts and methods from academic realm, and keeping introspective during the whole process. At the end of the project, we considered it as a successful architecting conduct, and believed that much experience can be gained from it. We describe the process, approaches, and results of this industrial practice. Experience and perspectives from the practitioners' points of view are analyzed and summarized. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it presents a real-world software architecture design phenomenon, shares first-hand experience and perspectives on the pragmatic architecture design practices, therefore provides some insights into the state of the practice. Secondly, it may inspire further research on more effective and efficient methods and tools for better practices.