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Architectural principles are foundational guidelines that govern decisions about system structure, interfaces, and quality attributes. They promote consistency, maintainability, and scalability by defining prioritized rules and trade-offs. Their scope spans enterprise architecture policies to team-level design standards and supports architects and product te…
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Theoretical construct: explains a term, principle, or mental model.
What you need to understand to reason about a domain.
Architecture principles are guidelines that steer important decisions about a system's structure, interfaces, and quality goals.
The term comes from software architecture, where structural choices are often costly to reverse and must be organized early. The literature defines architecture as the set of structures used to reason about a system and its properties; ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 formalizes architecture descriptions, viewpoints, and frameworks. Architecture principles condense that practice into prioritized rules for quality and trade-offs.
Think of architecture principles as guardrails above individual decisions. For each option, the team first checks the affected quality goal, then whether the option fits the principles, and finally whether a justified exception is needed. That keeps modules, APIs, data flows, and platform boundaries consistent without renegotiating every case from scratch.
A principle may apply to a team, platform, product, or the whole organization; the scope must be stated explicitly.
Principles steer decisions toward properties such as reliability, maintainability, security, or scalability.
Not every principle has the same weight; clear ranking helps resolve conflicts consistently.
Boundaries between building blocks are shaped to preserve exchangeability, encapsulation, and clarity.
When principles conflict, trade-offs must be made explicit and the reasoning documented.
Principles shape the decision process by structuring options and making deviations subject to justification.
Architecture principles help when many teams work on a platform, decisions need to stay comparable, or technical debt must be contained. They are especially useful for guardrails, review criteria, and architecture standards. Too rigid principles slow adaptation; too vague ones do not help when choices are hard. They work only when scope, exception handling, and trade-offs are clearly defined.
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