Separation of Concerns in a Layered Architecture¶

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About This MicroSim¶

A three-layer architecture (Presentation, Business Logic, Data Access) that contrasts clean separation of concerns with a concern violation. It shows how a single change to the Data Access layer propagates to far more components when a layer is skipped.

How to Use¶

Switch between Clean Architecture and Concern Violation modes. Click Trigger Data-Layer Change to highlight the components a change affects and read the blast-radius count. Click any component to see its responsibility.

Iframe Embed Code¶

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/atam/sims/separation-of-concerns-explorer/main.html"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan¶

Grade Level¶

Undergraduate / Professional

Duration¶

10-15 minutes

Prerequisites¶

Familiarity with layered architecture.

Bloom's Taxonomy Level¶

Understand (L2)

Learning Objective¶

Students can explain why separating concerns into distinct layers reduces the blast radius of a change, using a concrete visual example.

Activities¶

Exploration (5 min): Students freely interact with the MicroSim to discover its behavior.
Guided Practice (5 min): Working from the learning objective above, students answer 2-3 focused questions posed by the instructor.
Discussion (5 min): Students share observations and connect them back to ATAM concepts.

Assessment¶

Ask students to compare the blast-radius count between clean and violation modes and explain the difference in terms of skipped layers.

References¶

Bass, L., Clements, P., & Kazman, R. (2021). Software Architecture in Practice (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley.
Kazman, R., Klein, M., & Clements, P. (2000). ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation (CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004).