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Diagram
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Title
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Internal and External Architecture
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Building Architecture
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The Greeks were less concerned about internal architecture because their main rituals were outside.
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Architecture Intensive Disciplines
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Software architecture follows two activities - internal and external. The internal activity can be seen in authoring and coding. The external activity is in the user domain. Architecture and especially the balance between structure-function-aesthetics must be applied in both the internal and external perspectives.
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Case Study A: Large Corporate IT
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One of the systems developed involved large transaction processing. There were team members focused on back end development with hardly any user interfaces. The web based reports and user interfaces on the other hand were quite involved. Architectural designs were established for both prior to construction. The core architectural document from the first iteration still represented much of the architecture in successive iterations during the 2 year period - both the internal code and visible external interfaces underwent functional changes. The architectural design remained consistent and stable. One of the concerns of the architecture was that of internal activity (authoring code) and external activity (user functionality). Generativity of design to provide containers for future functional changes were considered. Structural integrity was from time to time impacted when functional additions were written in the wrong place or interfaces designs were not applied correctly.
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Case Study B: Small Commercial Team
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One of the key challenges to the new team was the lack of technical documentation regarding the software. An authoring standard was developed to provide an architecture for the internal part of the system. Much of the refactoring was to make apply quality standards internally without changing the externally visible functionality.
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