Structure

Structure is the arrangement of interrelated elements within a system, the building blocks a system is made of, and the dependencies and relationships that connect them. A system’s structure is distinct from its behavior. Structure describes what the parts are and how they relate, not what happens when the system runs.

In software architecture, structure is the recurring subject of architecture views such as the building block view, which documents a system’s static decomposition into modules and components. Documentation templates that organize architectural description around a fixed set of concerns, such as arc42, are themselves a kind of structure, imposing an arrangement on the documentation rather than on the system it describes.