What is the difference between Design and Architecture?

After 5 years of working with software development and struggling a lot with bad or/and not good architecture, I decided to start studying more deeply about it.
I will share experiences that I had and concepts from the Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin. In my opinion, there is no right and wrong architecture, if it works for you or your team I wish it keeps working. However, here we go some thoughts and ideas.

The answer to the title question is: there is no difference. The important thing to know is Design shapes low-level components and Architecture touches high-level components.

Let me share my chain of thought: you have a red Tesla with a door that opens from the bottom to the top. If the Tesla was blue, you still have a car with a door open functionality. If the door opens, as usual, you still have a car with a door open functionality. We have designs changes though. Even if you open the design project, you can see the Tesla architecture. You can’t have one without the other; indeed, no clear dividing line separates them.

However, if you have a Tesla without doors? You‘ll have a good design with bad architecture.

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We must not neglect architecture discussions and decisions. However, if you don’t have a choice, you must reserve days in the near future to revisit that because:

The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system.

Large software constructs are made from smaller software components, which are in turn made of smaller software components still, and so on. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system.

The measure of design quality is simply the measure of the effort required to meet the needs of the customer. If that effort is low and stays low throughout the lifetime of the system, the design is good.

By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion (Forbes. February 2, 2014). I believe they’ve built a product with very good architecture. One good example of excellent architecture according to the “uncle Bob” definitions.

I hope you have good insights from this read.