Concept

In software architecture, a concept is a plan, principle, or rule for how to solve a specific, recurring problem across a system – for example, how errors are handled, how logging is done, or how persistence is accessed.

Concepts are typically cross-cutting concerns. Rather than belonging to a single building block, a single concept constrains how many building blocks are implemented, so whoever builds any one of them is expected to adhere to it.

A consistent set of concepts, applied uniformly across a system, is what gives that system its conceptual integrity – the sense, wherever you look, that you’re looking at part of one coherent design, rather than a patchwork of independent decisions.