Software: Architecture and Product Design

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion while sitting at the bar with fellow architects and product managers. The discussion was about Software Architecture and Software Product Design. From the discussion I have drawn following observations:

Software Architecture governs fundamental structure, communication model among components/module and non functional aspects like: scalability, resilience, reliability, deploy-ability, maintainability, security, standard compliance, technology base, etc.

Product Design determine observable aspects of an software product like feature set, usability, visual aspects, installation ease, configure-ability, business model support, etc.




Certainly these observations were made after a couple of drinks.