Roughly every decade the software development field experiences a shift in software design paradigms. Design methodologies and tools must evolve as the problems and technologies become more complex. Software development was born around 1949 when the first stored-program computer, the Cambridge EDSAC, was created. Programs were initially created as binary machine instructions. This approach to programming proved to be slow and difficult because of the human inability to easily memorize long, complex binary strings. The notion of a human-readable shorthand for designing programs was conceived. Initially, the concept behind the programming shorthand was to allow a program designer to design a program and for a programmer or coder to manually translate the shorthand into binary code.

In the early 1950s, it became apparent that the majority of a programmer's time was spent correcting mistakes in software. One response to this situation was the creation of program subroutines that allowed programmers to reuse program fragments that had already been written and debugged, thus improving the productivity of programmers. By the late 1950s, the handcrafting of programs—even with the aid of reusable subroutines—was becoming uneconomical. Hence research in the area of automatic programming systems began. Automatic programming would allow programmers to write programs in a high-level language code, which was easier to read by humans, that would then be converted into binary machine instructions by use of another program. Thus, the first paradigm shift in software development was about to occur.

Software architecture involves the integration of software development methodologies and models, which distinguishes it from particular analysis and design methodologies. The structure of complex software solutions departs from the description of the problem, adding to the complexity of software development. Software architecture is a body of methods and techniques that helps us to manage the complexities of software development.

Software architecture is a natural extension of the software engineering discipline. In early literature it was simply referred to as programming in the large. Software architecture presents a view of a software system as components and connectors. Components encapsulate some coherent set of functionality. Connectors realize the runtime interaction between components. The system design achieves certain qualities based on its composition from components and connectors. The architecture of a software system can be specified in a document called the architectural description. Software architecture design is not entirely different from existing software design methodologies. Rather it complements them with additional views of a system that have not been traditionally handled by methodologies like object-oriented design. We will learn that software architecture fits within a larger enterprise architecture that also encompasses business architecture, information technology architecture, and data architecture.