Architecture (glossary)

(1) 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 (ISO/IEC 2008, Section 4.5)

(2) The organizational structure of a system or component (ISO/IEC 2009, 1); (3) the organizational structure of a system and its implementation guidelines (ISO/IEC 2009, 1)

(3) Fundamental concepts or properties of a system in its environment embodied in its elements, relationships, and in the principles of its design and evolution. (ISO/IEC 2007) and (42010 2010 final committee draft) A system architecture generally includes a functional architecture, a physical architecture, a temporal architecture.

Source

(1) ISO/IEC. 2008. Systems and Software engineering - System Life Cycle Processes. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electronical Commission (IEC), ISO/IEC 15288:2008 (E).

(2) ISO/IEC. 2009. "Systems and Software Engineering Vocabulary (SEVocab)" - ISO/IEC 24765. in International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electronical Commission (IEC) [database online]. Geneva, Switzerland, 2009 [cited December 21 2009]. Available from http://pascal.computer.org/sev_display/index.action.

(3) ISO/IEC. 2007. Systems and Software Engineering - Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standards (ISO)/International Electronical Commission (IEC), ISO/IEC 42010:2007.

Discussion

A few definitions are presented here to provide illustrations of how some different authors define architecture. Note that many authors write extensively on architecture without ever defining what they mean by the term.

IEEE 1471 (ANSI/IEEE. 2000) - Normative: “The fundamental organization of a system embodied into its constituent parts, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution. The architecture associated with a System of Interest is conceptual, and is realized through an architectural description.”

ISO/IEC/IEEE FDIS 42010 (ISO/IEC/IEEE. 2011) - Normative: “The fundamental concepts or properties of a system in its environment embodied in its elements, relationships, and in the principles of its design and evolution.”

OMG (Normative): “The organizational structure and associated behavior of a system. An architecture can be recursively decomposed into parts that interact through interfaces, relationships that connect parts, and constraints for assembling parts.”

Stevens et al (Informative, paraphrase) (Stevens.1998): “The layout, structure and behavior of a system at a level of abstraction that allows useful reasoning about the system as a whole.”