Before our engineers begin writing code, our lead software engineer will design the system’s architecture. This specification will ensure that as the team collaborates on building the system, it’ll appear to be designed by one-mind. Having a system architecture is known to improve long term maintainability, adherence to functional specification, and ultimately minimize wasted effort.

After the project lead has worked with you to prepare a functional specification, they will begin work on the system architecture designs. These designs are a conceptual representation of all components and subcomponents in a system. Below are some of the common items that come out of this process.

Data Schema

During a product’s life cycle, the structure and volume of data will scale. If the storage mechanisms are improperly designed, then it could cause performance issues or worse, put the integrity of your data at risk. Depending on the complexity of your system, the system architect will prepare schemas as UML compliant diagrams that denote relationships between entities and their properties. Data schemas may also include a visual representation of tables, views, stored procedures, and functions that are used in data storage. Some systems warrant varying levels of granularity.

Data Flow Diagram

Most systems often take data in from external sources and emit them out to third-parties. It’s important to understand the needs of these sources so that data can be gracefully and consistently transformed as it passes in and out of the system. Sometimes, systems can provide dashboards or reporting to prepare and store aggregations or stratifications of the raw data.

Knowing how the data will flow is essential for developers to know before they begin writing a single line of code. For this reason, the architect will typically prepare flow diagrams that depict the state of data as it moves between systems and services, as well as field mappings between those variants. With a data flow diagram developers can also visualize how the system works, what it does, and how best to implement it. Data flow diagrams are imperative to the software development cycle to reduce ambiguity and increase productivity.

Activity Flow Diagrams

While collaborating with the user experience designers, the system architect will take the functional specs and use cases to document activity flows. These are visual representations of how actions from users affect a system as well as the resulting pathways of events as it reacts to various states in the system. Activity diagrams use a set of specialized symbols to denote where the flow starts and ends along with actions, decisions, and controls. Based on an activity diagram developers can visualize actions that should be taken at different stages of a process and code them appropriately.