Solution Architecture

Basically these documents list each component, the architecture should be seen as a group of artifacts, each artifact resolves a bit of the proposed solution and architecture. It depicts how something’s parts come together to be a whole solution for the requirements.

There are a few types of architecture:

• Enterprise Architecture, designed to provide a high-level overview of the Enterprise, including the business processes, Community structures, systems (HW and SW) and the desired evolution of the existing architecture (Where do we want to go (today)?). In general this architecture is based upon a frame work and as such provides a standard way to model the community architecture to ensure consistency across the organisation and everyone who is involved in the process of requirements solutions.
• System Architecture, is the architecture that looks at the whole of a system, for example multiple software programs that run on a bit of hardware and/or controlling that hardware to perform some sort of action that was specified.  This is unlike software architecture that only looks at a particular bit of software. This architecture is to ensure that the hardware and software is understood and that it will be designed correctly and that the interdependencies are met.
• Software Architecture, this is the model that actually visualises the software design as it is intended to be used. It is used to model different components that make up the application to fit and to share data, functions and business processes. The enterprise architecture is directly related to the business needs, the software architecture is more indirect by making sure that the designs comply with the enterprise architecture.

Logical Architecture

This is one level of abstraction and is used to represent an architecture that is independent of the overall technology that is going to be implemented. It is about how things should look like it is not intended to show implementation of the software and or system it is intended to show an abstraction.

It is in general in a non technical language.

 

Physical Architecture

This is the second level of abstraction and is used to represent the detailed architect on how the software and systems are designed, including how they fit within different technologies that are available in the community.