I have designed an management system for a medical practice and I am writing the design specification and I am kind of stumped by what to write for a section.
It asks for me to write about the components of a system but I am perplexed. What exactly are components within a system? Is this generally considered as the features that a system has or does it mean something else altogether?
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Component can mean several things depending on, heck, a lot of things actually. Generally it’s a distinct unit of functionality.
A little red warning light popped on when you said you were unsure “what to write for a section”. It suggests you’re either doing a college project, or using a pre-created template. Neither of these are bad things, but it does mean that the definition of component may have a very specific definition, as will the scope of the section.
TOGAF (serious architecture) gives a bunch of good definitions which I’ll quote below, but if you are completing an assignment, your best bet is really to ask the people setting the assignment. Academia has some weird ideas about what happens in the real world sometimes 😉
I’ve grabbed a bunch of TOGAF from one section because all of these, could fall under one person’s definition of a component, not just the two with component in the title 🙂
TOGAF defintions:
Actor: A person, organization, or system that is outside the
consideration of the architecture model, but interacts with it.
Application Component: An encapsulation of application functionality that is aligned to implementation structuring.
Business Service: Supports business capabilities through an explicitly defined interface and is explicitly governed by an
organization.
Data Entity: An encapsulation of data that is recognized by a business domain expert as a discrete concept. Data entities can be tied to applications, repositories, and services and may be structured according to implementation considerations.
Function: Delivers business capabilities closely aligned to an organization, but not explicitly governed by the organization.
Information System Service: The automated elements of a business service. An information system service may deliver or support part or all of one or more business services.
Organization Unit: A self-contained unit of resources with goals, objectives, and measures. Organization units may include external parties and business partner organizations.
Platform Service: A technical capability required to provide enabling infrastructure that supports the delivery of applications.
Role: An actor assumes a role to perform a task.
Technology Component: An encapsulation of technology infrastructure that represents a class of technology product or specific technology product.
The architecture of a system deployment is like a map to guide people to understanding what all the other pieces are and how they relate to each other; it’s somewhere that people start out with when figuring out what is going on, before they delve into the detail in the other sections.
I’d talk about major components like “database”, “email system”, etc.
Some parts may need subsidiary architectures, others (like the database) don’t because they’re essentially just brought in from third-party providers.
A component is an underlying element of a complex system. For example, the braking system of a vehicle has components like brake pads, calipers, hydraulic cylinders and so on.
So likely components of your managements system would be billing, scheduling, or med inventory. It is not so much about features, though the features do relate to the components that provide them. Features would be the abilities of the system, components would be the constructs that enable the features.