Define architecture and its importance in system design

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Architectural decisions are the most important design decisions; i.e., they decide the most important aspects of the solution. To understand architecture, we must first gain a good knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the solution, but the design of the product must start with architecture because it is the architecture that decides the fate of every nut and every bolt. The importance of architecture, however, works against a clear definition because various definitions might view it from widely different viewpoints without even contradicting each other. Also, the term architecture can apply to both the actual product and an abstraction of it. In other words, architecture can be seen as either the organization of a system's major components and the relationships of these component's to each other and to the whole, or as how such an organization and/or its development is viewed or modeled.