1. About the book
This book is a practical, pragmatic and lightweight guide to software architecture, specifically aimed at developers, and focussed around the software architecture role and process.
Why did I write the book?
Like many people, I started my career as a software developer, taking instruction from my seniors and working with teams to deliver software systems. Over time, I started designing smaller pieces of software systems and eventually evolved into a position where I was performing what I now consider to be the software architecture role.
I’ve worked for IT consulting organisations for the majority of my career, and this means that most of the projects that I’ve been involved with have resulted in software systems being built either for or with our customers. In order to scale an IT consulting organisation, you need more people and more teams. And to create more teams, you need more software architects. And this leads me to why I wrote this book:
- Software architecture needs to be more accessible: Despite having some fantastic mentors, I didn’t find it easy to understand what was expected of me when I was moving into my first software architecture roles. Sure, there are lots of software architecture books out there, but they seem to be written from a different perspective. I found most of them very research oriented or academic in nature, yet I was a software developer looking for real-world advice. I wanted to write the type of book that I would have found useful at that stage in my career - a book about software architecture aimed at software developers.
- All software projects need software architecture: I like agile approaches, I really do, but the lack of explicit regard for software architecture in many of the approaches doesn’t sit well with me. Agile approaches don’t say that you shouldn’t do any up front design, but they often don’t explicitly talk about it either. I’ve found that this causes people to jump to the wrong conclusion and I’ve seen the consequences that a lack of any up front thinking can have. I also fully appreciate that big design up front isn’t the answer either. I’ve always felt that there’s a happy medium to be found where some up front thinking is done, particularly when working with a team that has a mix of experiences and backgrounds. I favour a lightweight approach to software architecture that allows me to put some building blocks in place as early as possible, to stack the odds of success in my favour.
- Lightweight software architecture practices: I’ve learnt and evolved a number of practices over the years, which I’ve always felt have helped me to perform the software architecture role. These relate to the software design process and identifying technical risks through to communicating and documenting software architecture. I’ve always assumed that these practices are just common sense, but I’ve discovered that this isn’t the case. I’ve taught these practices to thousands of people over the past few years and I’ve seen the difference they can make. A book helps me to spread these ideas further, with the hope that other people will find them useful too.
A new approach to software development?
This book isn’t about creating a new approach to software development, but it does seek to find a happy mid-point between the excessive up front thinking typical of traditional methods and the lack of any architecture thinking that often happens in software teams who are new to agile approaches. There is room for up front design and evolutionary architecture to coexist.