The Irrelevance of Architecture
Grady Booch · IEEE Software · 2007
The architecture of a software-intensive system is largely irrelevant to its end users. Far more important to these stakeholders is the system's behavior, exhibited by raw, naked, running code. Most interesting system tests should be based on the use cases that are identified incrementally over the system's life cycle, the same use cases that the system's architects used to guide their design decisions. Testers can conduct other system tests only after the system's architecture is crisp. Just as analysts use a system's architecture as scaffolding along which to climb and examine the details of every edge, so too can testers use a system's architecture to devise tests that are relevant to the particular texture of that implementation