Software Architecture for Developers
Technical leadership by coding, coaching, collaboration, architecture sketching and just enough up front design
3421 readers
by
Simon Brown
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This book is a practical and pragmatic guide to lightweight software architecture for developers. You'll learn:
JavaRanch awarded the book 10/10 - "Highly recommended reading."
Software architecture has traditionally been associated with big design up front and waterfall-style projects, where a team would ensure that every last element of the software design was considered before any code was written. Software architecture is basically about the high-level structure of a software system and how you get to an understanding of it. This is about the significant decisions that influence the shape of a software system rather than understanding how long every column in the database should be.
Regardless of the size and complexity of the resulting product, every software team needs to consider software architecture. Why? Put simply, bad things tend to happen if they don't! If software architecture is about structure and vision, not thinking about this tends to lead to poorly structured, internally inconsistent software systems that are hard to understand, hard to maintain and potentially don't satisfy one or more of the important non-functional requirements such as performance, scalability or security. Explicitly thinking about software architecture provides you with a way to introduce technical leadership and stacks the odds of a successful delivery in your favour.
The image that many people have of software architects is of traditional "ivory tower" software architects dictating instructions to an unsuspecting development team. It doesn't need to be like this though, with modern software architects preferring an approach that favours coding, coaching and collaborative design. The software architecture role doesn't necessarily need to be undertaken by a single person plus coding is a great way to understand whether the resulting architecture is actually going to work.
Again, traditional views of software architecture often conjure up images of huge UML (Unified Modeling Language) models that attempt to capture every last drop of detail. While creating and communicating a common vision is important, you don't need to use UML. In fact, you could argue that UML isn't a great method for communicating software architecture anyway. If you keep a few simple guidelines in mind, lightweight "boxes and lines" style sketches are an effective way to communicate software architecture.
There's a common misconception that "architecture" and "agile" are competing forces, there being a conflict between them. This simply isn't the case though. On the contrary, a good software architecture enables agility, helping you embrace and implement change. Good software architectures aren't created by themselves though, and some conscious effort is needed.
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Simon lives in Jersey (the largest of the Channel Islands) and works as an independent consultant, specialising in software architecture and its role in modern software development teams. Simon is an award-winning speaker on the topic of software architecture and provides consulting/training to software teams at organisations across Europe, ranging from small startups through to global blue chip companies. He is the founder of Coding the Architecture, which is a website for hands-on software architects. He still codes too.
Websites: http://www.simonbrown.je and Coding the Architecture
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