Five critical views of architecture

The Harmony process defines six critical views of architecture, as shown in Figure 3.1. Each view focuses on a different aspect of the largest scale optimization concerns of the system:

• Subsystem/Component Architecture is about the identification of subsystems, the allocation of responsibilities to the subsystems, and the specification of their interfaces.
• Distribution Architecture selects the means by which distributed parts of the system nteract, including middleware and communication protocols; this includes, but is not limited to, network architecture.
• Concurrency and Resource Architecture details the set of concurrency regions (threads and processes), how semantic elements map into those concurrency regions, how they are scheduled, and how they effectively share and manage shared resources.
• Data Architecture focuses on how data is managed. It includes technical means and policies for data storage, backup, retrieval...