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Component Identification Process

3 min readStatus:Seedling

Core Idea

Component identification is a systematic process for partitioning a system into physical deployment units aligned with business domain, technical responsibilities, and architectural characteristics.

Understanding Component Identification

What It Does: Component identification transforms abstract architectural thinking into concrete code organization:

  • Unlike arbitrary technical divisions, this process ensures that component boundaries support maintainability, scalability, deployability, and other critical architectural characteristics

Five-Step Workflow:

Step 1: Identify initial components:

  • Use either domain-driven design principles or technical layering patterns
  • Establishes a starting point based on logical groupings of functionality

Step 2: Assign specific requirements and user stories:

  • Assign to components
  • Clarifies ownership and responsibility

Step 3: Analyze each component’s roles and responsibilities:

  • Ensure boundaries are clear and cohesive
  • Avoid components that try to do too many unrelated things

Step 4: Analyze how each component relates to architectural characteristics:

  • A component requiring high scalability has different needs than one prioritizing security or maintainability
  • Critical: If component boundaries don’t align with characteristic requirements, you’ll struggle to evolve the system

Step 5: Restructure components:

  • Based on characteristic analysis
  • Create boundaries that enable the system to meet its long-term architectural goals

Preventing the Technical Convenience Trap:

Common mistake: Organizing components solely around current technical convenience:

  • What seems simple today:
    • Placing all database logic in one component
    • All UI in another
  • Often creates bottlenecks tomorrow when different parts of the system need to scale or deploy independently

The Iterative Nature - Essential to Success:

Why iteration matters:

  • Initial component boundaries are rarely correct
  • As you assign requirements and analyze characteristics, you discover misalignments
  • A component that seemed cohesive reveals itself as serving incompatible characteristics
  • Solution: Regular restructuring based on emerging understanding keeps architecture aligned with reality

Why This Matters

Component boundaries are among the most consequential architectural decisions:

  • They determine team ownership, deployment frequency, independent scalability, and long-term maintainability
  • Choosing boundaries based only on technical layers (presentation, business logic, data) optimizes for code reuse but not for change
  • Choosing them based on business domains optimizes for agility and team autonomy

Without a systematic identification process:

  • Component boundaries drift toward organizational structure (Conway’s Law) or developer convenience rather than architectural intent
  • This creates systems that are difficult to evolve, deploy, or scale because the physical structure fights against the characteristics you’re trying to achieve

Sources

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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