This book contains a couple of examples of System Architecture Documentation based upon the practical, economical, well-established and systematic arc42 approach. It shows how you can document and communicate system architectures (i.e. architecture of hardware/software systems).

This practical guide shows how you can effectively apply the practical and well-proven arc42 template to design, develop and document your software architecture. It contains more than 200 concrete and pragmatical tips how to improve your architecture communication and documentation:

• immediately actionable tips
• arc42 for practical software development
• effective communication and documentation of software architectures
• arc42 to construct, design and implement new systems
• arc42 to document existing system
• arc42 for { large | medium | small } systems
• tools for arc42: wikis, asciidoc, modeling tools an others
• frequently asked questions around arc42

This book contains several real-world software architectures, documented with the practical arc42 template.

You will learn about the inner workings of a chess engine, a huge CRM system, a cool web system to track biking activities and an extremely small menu-bar application.

Each of the examples starts with a brief description of the problem domain, including the quality requirements, before we explain the system context with all the external interfaces. Then we dive into an overview of the solution strategy to prepare you for the implementation building blocks and runtime scenarios (as major architectural views).

Later on we explain the crosscutting concepts of every architecture and its implementation.

You will learn that documentation can be compact, helpful and easy-to-read.

Status Decemter 2022: We just started editing a new and enhanced edition of the book. Ever reader will get this new version (our third edition) as a free update, of course!