You may just be learning about the iterative, emergent architecture method known as “4+1”.  You can read the original paper here.  Written by Philippe Kruchten in 1995, this 15-page paper lays out the views that are needed in order to communicate the architectural elements of a software system. Coursera has a good summary video in their course catalog here.

Architects in other professions go through similar thought processes as software architects, so it can be useful to borrow the graphical outputs that these other architects generate as illustrations of the decisions made while finding a solution suitable to the problem.

Continuous Delivery is an umbrella terms used to describe the process for an automated system that takes changes to the source and configuration of a system and flows those changes through a process and ultimately to a running production system while catching quality issues. Jez Humble maintains a very useful site dedicated to continuous delivery here.

I recently presented a sample 4+1 architecture to the Cloud Austin user group. Since I received several requests for the diagram, I’m posting it here. If you have any additional questions, contact me.  I’m always happy to help.  Additionally, I have a high-resolution PDF of this diagram (ARCH D in size, if you would like to print it on a plotter).