Why software architecture?

"The Roman architect Vitruvius made a timeless statement of what constitutes good architectural design: strength (firmitas), utility (utilitas), and beauty (venustas). (Vitruvius) This holds true for our software architectures." (Goodliffe)

As I said before, the history shows that the technological growth rate is kind of an exponential one. Growth in computing power, growth in information and communications technology, growth in nanotechnology, and to sum up, growth in any technological science.  So what does this mean? This mean that any business, corporation or organization even a non technological one, necessarily requires to evolve and adapt all this changes in order to grow, be competitive, and even to survive.

Now, regarding software, a good design, the use of patterns, and an appropriate architecture is key to adapt all this changes and tendencies into any information system. At this moment it's hard to think in any business without at least a point of sale program that helps to automatize processes of the company. All these systems need a nice architecture so in the future will be easier to add new features to the existing software, have a better code maintainability, new technical features, such a different front ends, or adding new business markets. Software architecture manifests the earliest design decisions about a system, and these early bonds are really important regarding to the system's remaining development, its deployment, and its maintenance life. It is also the earliest point at which design decisions ruling the system to be built can be analyzed. Programmers and designers should implement software architectures that expresses the business needs and make it scalable and reusable, applying the right design to each specific scenario, creating elegant and functional developments qualified to compete in this changing world.