Information System Architectures: From Art to Science

: The presentation claims that architectural design plays a crucial role in system development as a first step in a process that turns a requirements specification into a working software and hardware system. As such, architectural design should follow a rigorous methodology – a science – rather than intuition – an art. Our basic premise is that requirements in information systems follow a service philosophy, where services are characterized by their functionality and quality-ofservice parameters. We develop a design hypothesis that takes the service characteristics into account in a stepwise fashion. We then validate the hypothesis for traditional database characteristics, demonstrate for novel requirements how these would affect architectures, and finally apply it to the current 4-tier server architectures. 1 Motivation Information systems grow in the diversity of their application domains, number of users, and geographic distribution, but so does their complexity in terms of t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: BTW
• Authors: Peter C. Lockemann
• Keywords: 4-tier Server Architectures, Architectural Design, BTW 2003, Crucial Role