Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond

By Emma Walls

Book Overview

"This new edition is brighter, shinier, more complete, more pragmatic, more focused than the previous one, and I wouldn't have thought it possible to improve on the original. As the field of software architecture has grown over these past decades, there is much more to be said, much more that we know, and much more that we can reflect upon of what's worked and what hasn't--and the authors here do all that, and more." --From the Foreword by Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Software architecture--the conceptual glue that holds every phase of a project together for its many stakeholders--is widely recognized as a critical element in modern software development. Practitioners have increasingly discovered that close attention to a software system's architecture pays valuable dividends. Without an architecture that is appropriate for the problem being solved, a project will stumble along or, most likely, fail. Even with a superb architecture, if that architecture is not well understood or well communicated the project is unlikely to succeed. Documenting Software Architectures, Second Edition, provides the most complete and current guidance, independent of language or notation, on how to capture an architecture in a commonly understandable form. Drawing on their extensive experience, the authors first help you decide what information to document, and then, with guidelines and examples (in various notations, including UML), show you how to express an architecture so that others can successfully build, use, and maintain a system from it. The book features rules for sound documentation, the goals and strategies of documentation, architectural views and styles, documentation for software interfaces and software behavior, and templates for capturing and organizing information to generate a coherent package. New and improved in this second edition: Coverage of architectural styles such as service-oriented architectures, multi-tier architectures, and data models Guidance for documentation in an Agile development environment Deeper treatment of documentation of rationale, reflecting best industrial practices Improved templates, reflecting years of use and feedback, and more documentation layout options A new, comprehensive example (available online), featuring documentation of a Web-based service-oriented system Reference guides for three important architecture documentation languages: UML, AADL, and SySML This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201703726
• ISBN13: 9780201703726
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

The best thinking on documenting software architecture

Simply put, I think this book represents the best thinking about documenting software architectures. You can find other books that include different aspects covered in this book (documenting views, 4+1, ANSI/IEEE-1471-2000, etc). However, you will have a hard time finding a book that pulls it all together, provides the rationale and includes the "beyond" part which discusses other approaches to documenting software architectures...

detailed advice about designing

Clements shows how to use various notations to document your software design. Of these, perhaps UML is now the most common. The advice in the text can be used to first design your code, before programming. Certainly, you should somehow have a design laid out first. You do, don't you? The book offers structural advice about how to do this. From the low level "mechanical" details of the UML notation, to more general conceptual...

The best to date

Software architecture really is unlike any other aspect of its design. The architecture has deeper meaning and larger scale than any other aspect, and can't be discussed in the same ways.This book opens that discussion. Among the "architecture" books I've read lately, this is the only one to offer concrete advice on describing, presenting, and analyzing archtiectural features of a system. It identifies a number of documentation...

The only technical documentation book you'll need

After reading my colleague's comments I rushed out and purchased this book. I, too, am trained and certified in Information Mapping© and was impressed at how closely the approach in this book is aligned to that method. However, what I like most is the fact that this book can be used as guidance for a wider scope than just documenting software architectures because it shows how to organize your documentation requirements,...

Should be an establish standard for documenting

Since reading a fascinating document titled "CMU/SEI-2001-TN-010 - Documenting Software Architectures: Organization of Documentation Package" a year ago and discovering that the approximately 20-page document was the basis for a book I have patiently waited, and am delighted with how the book turned out.First, this book stands out as one of the clearest descriptions of how to not only document architectures, but how to manage...