Our advice
Design the functional and physical architectures of complex systems

Force yourself to model the functional architecture, even if you're still building the same type of system

A change in performance may call into question the validity of certain functions, and therefore affect final operation, due to erroneous allocations on inadequate physical elements.

A physical architecture should comprise no more than 7 to 10 components. The physical architecture of any system consists of a single layer. If you have a large number of components, you can break them down into layers of (sub)systems. This is one way of controlling system complexity.