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Architectural Objectives and Design Principles

Document status35 - Reviewed

This section outlines the key architectural objectives and foundational design principles that guide the development of robust software systems.

These principles are intended to steer architectural decisions and ensure the resulting system is robust, adaptable, and sustainable over time.

The primary architectural objectives are to:

  • Improve maintainability – Reduce the cost and effort of ongoing maintenance by promoting clarity, structure, and isolation of responsibilities.

  • Enhance flexibility – Enable the system to evolve with changing requirements without introducing unintended side effects and regression.

  • Support scalability – Ensure the architecture can accommodate growth in features, users, and data without degrading flexibility or maintainability.

These objectives serve as foundational principles to be applied consistently throughout system design and implementation.

1. Modular Design​

The architecture should promote clear separation of functionality through well-defined, self-contained modules.

  • Each module encapsulates a coherent feature set or responsibility, making it independently understandable and testable.

  • Modules should be composable, enabling reuse across solutions or projects.

  • Modular design improves change management by making it easier to introduce new features or replace existing ones without widespread impact.

This principle directly supports all three architectural objectives: maintainability, flexibility, and scalability.

2. Loose Coupling​

To reduce dependencies and complexity, modules must interact through abstract, well-defined interfaces rather than concrete implementations.

  • This ensures that internal details remain encapsulated within each module.

  • Dependencies should be explicit and managed through interfaces and inversion of control (dependency injection).

  • Low coupling makes it easier to modify or replace modules independently, which minimizes regression risk during ongoing development.

Low coupling supports isolated and independent development, testing, and deployment, increasing the resilience and preventing regression, thereby supporting both maintainability and scalability.

3. High Cohesion​

Each module should have a focused and narrowly scoped responsibility, grouping only those features and components that belong together conceptually.

  • All parts of a module should contribute to its primary purpose, and unrelated responsibilities should be separated into other modules.

  • High cohesion simplifies reasoning about system behavior and limits the scope of changes.

This principle enhances clarity, testability, and change isolation, thereby improving overall maintainability and scalability.