Inclusive Educational Review of Software Architectural Styles and Patterns for the Students of the College of Information and Computing Sciences of Cagayan State University

Abstract

A good architectural design has a high contribution to the success of a system. In addition, this architectural design is useful for the Information Technology (IT) students as their basis of their software development of their capstone project. The utilization of inappropriate architecture can lead to disastrous consequences for IT student researchers. A detailed understanding of software architecture styles is very useful to analyze distributed and complex systems which is the trend of capstone projects. This paper explores the quality attributes of three architecture styles namely shared-nothing, broker, and representational state transfer, which are perceived as beneficial to distributed system architecture that serve as guide to student researchers. This is to provide a picture of the said three key software architecture styles which could be helpful not only for student researchers but also for the software developers by adding references to minimize the uncertainty while selecting the appropriate architectural style for their specific needs. An architectural style must be chosen correctly to obtain all its benefits in the system. In this paper, the three architectural styles are compared on the foundation of various quality attributes derived from ISO 9126-1 standard such as functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, and portability. The results of the study are useful to guide the student researchers in their capstone project and to reduce the number of unsuccessful attempts of software development component of their capstone project.