Concepts provide solutions to recurring problems.

We use the term “concept” for rules, principles or other decisions, guidelines, processes that influence one or more elements of the architecture.

• Decisions, or concepts that cannot adequatly be assigned to a single building block
• Decisions or rules that influence several:
  • building blocks
  • parts of the implementation
  • runtime scenarios
  • interfaces
  • several developers

Other people like to call crosscutting aspects by different names. In practice we encountered the following terms:

• approaches
• aspects: like in “aspect-oriented-programming”
• concepts: our favorite
• principles
• regulations
• rules
• tactics: like in design tactics, a term coined in 2003 by the Software Engineering Institute. They define tactics as “architectural decisions that can be used to achieve desired quality attribute requirements”
• strategies