Software Design, Architecture, Enterprise Architecture

Software Architecture: 

SA is the high-level overview of the software system. It visualizes and briefly describes the organization of the different software components, their functions, and their behavior. It also shows the interaction with the necessary supporting system. For example, SA for a word processor software could visualize and describe each and every individual component of the word processor, describe its functions, and show its interaction with necessary surrounding supporting systems like interaction with printer or file system. SA is important because it is a convenient way of representing the overall software, its behavior, and surrounding intersection so that stakeholders, developers, and users get a high-level overview of the software.

Software Design:

This is the initial phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), conceptualizing the software requirements into software implementation. This conceptualization using Unified Modeling Language (UML) with proper description helps developers better know the software to implement. The design phase includes designing all the activities needed to convert software requirements to proper implementation. The design flow may work like below:

Software Requirements -> High-level design -> Detailed design

High-level design: Breaks the architecture design into less abstracted sub-systems and shows interaction among each of the sub-systems.

Detailed Design: More detailed and easy to implement. Interface and class-level design and interaction become visible through detailed design.

Enterprise Architecture:

EA is a conceptual design of an organization (enterprise) to improve the organization's business strategy, and productivity and achieve business goals through the use of software components and information systems. It is a kind of high-level design that shows how software components automate the business process to help the business grow and be well-managed. EA design shows the overall information flow of an organization along with all the automated software processes. Other than the UML, a number of EA tools are available, those are easy to design an EA for any organization.