Essential Software Architecture


Book Description

Job titles like “Technical Architect” and “Chief Architect” nowadays abound in software industry, yet many people suspect that “architecture” is one of the most overused and least understood terms in professional software development. Gorton’s book tries to resolve this dilemma. It concisely describes the essential elements of knowledge and key skills required to be a software architect. The explanations encompass the essentials of architecture thinking, practices, and supporting technologies. They range from a general understanding of structure and quality attributes through technical issues like middleware components and service-oriented architectures to recent technologies like model-driven architecture, software product lines, aspect-oriented design, and the Semantic Web, which will presumably influence future software systems. This second edition contains new material covering enterprise architecture, agile development, enterprise service bus technologies, RESTful Web services, and a case study on how to use the MeDICi integration framework. All approaches are illustrated by an ongoing real-world example. So if you work as an architect or senior designer (or want to someday), or if you are a student in software engineering, here is a valuable and yet approachable knowledge source for you.




12 Essential Skills for Software Architects


Book Description

Master the Crucial Non -Technical Skills Every Software Architect Needs! Thousands of software professionals have the necessary technical qualifications to become architects, but far fewer have the crucial non-technical skills needed to get hired and succeed in this role. In today's agile environments, these "soft" skills have grown even more crucial to success as an architect. For many developers, however, these skills don't come naturally-and they're rarely addressed in formal training. Now, long-time software architect Dave Hendricksen helps you fill this gap, supercharge your organisational impact, and quickly move to the next level in your career. In 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects, Hendricksen begins by pinpointing the specific relationship, personal, and business skills that successful architects rely upon. Next, he presents proven methods for systematically developing and sharpening every one of these skills, from negotiation and leadership to pragmatism and vision. From start to finish, this book's practical insights can help you get the architect position you want-and thrive once you have it! The soft skills you need... ...and a coherent framework and practical methodology for mastering them! Relationship skills Leadership, politics, gracious behavior, communication, negotiation Personal skills Context switching, transparency, passion Business skills Pragmatism, vision, business knowledge, innovation




Fundamentals of Software Architecture


Book Description

Salary surveys worldwide regularly place software architect in the top 10 best jobs, yet no real guide exists to help developers become architects. Until now. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of software architecture’s many aspects. Aspiring and existing architects alike will examine architectural characteristics, architectural patterns, component determination, diagramming and presenting architecture, evolutionary architecture, and many other topics. Mark Richards and Neal Ford—hands-on practitioners who have taught software architecture classes professionally for years—focus on architecture principles that apply across all technology stacks. You’ll explore software architecture in a modern light, taking into account all the innovations of the past decade. This book examines: Architecture patterns: The technical basis for many architectural decisions Components: Identification, coupling, cohesion, partitioning, and granularity Soft skills: Effective team management, meetings, negotiation, presentations, and more Modernity: Engineering practices and operational approaches that have changed radically in the past few years Architecture as an engineering discipline: Repeatable results, metrics, and concrete valuations that add rigor to software architecture




Clean Architecture


Book Description

Practical Software Architecture Solutions from the Legendary Robert C. Martin (“Uncle Bob”) By applying universal rules of software architecture, you can dramatically improve developer productivity throughout the life of any software system. Now, building upon the success of his best-selling books Clean Code and The Clean Coder, legendary software craftsman Robert C. Martin (“Uncle Bob”) reveals those rules and helps you apply them. Martin’s Clean Architecture doesn’t merely present options. Drawing on over a half-century of experience in software environments of every imaginable type, Martin tells you what choices to make and why they are critical to your success. As you’ve come to expect from Uncle Bob, this book is packed with direct, no-nonsense solutions for the real challenges you’ll face–the ones that will make or break your projects. Learn what software architects need to achieve–and core disciplines and practices for achieving it Master essential software design principles for addressing function, component separation, and data management See how programming paradigms impose discipline by restricting what developers can do Understand what’s critically important and what’s merely a “detail” Implement optimal, high-level structures for web, database, thick-client, console, and embedded applications Define appropriate boundaries and layers, and organize components and services See why designs and architectures go wrong, and how to prevent (or fix) these failures Clean Architecture is essential reading for every current or aspiring software architect, systems analyst, system designer, and software manager–and for every programmer who must execute someone else’s designs. Register your product for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available.




Just Enough Software Architecture


Book Description

This is a practical guide for software developers, and different than other software architecture books. Here's why: It teaches risk-driven architecting. There is no need for meticulous designs when risks are small, nor any excuse for sloppy designs when risks threaten your success. This book describes a way to do just enough architecture. It avoids the one-size-fits-all process tar pit with advice on how to tune your design effort based on the risks you face. It democratizes architecture. This book seeks to make architecture relevant to all software developers. Developers need to understand how to use constraints as guiderails that ensure desired outcomes, and how seemingly small changes can affect a system's properties. It cultivates declarative knowledge. There is a difference between being able to hit a ball and knowing why you are able to hit it, what psychologists refer to as procedural knowledge versus declarative knowledge. This book will make you more aware of what you have been doing and provide names for the concepts. It emphasizes the engineering. This book focuses on the technical parts of software development and what developers do to ensure the system works not job titles or processes. It shows you how to build models and analyze architectures so that you can make principled design tradeoffs. It describes the techniques software designers use to reason about medium to large sized problems and points out where you can learn specialized techniques in more detail. It provides practical advice. Software design decisions influence the architecture and vice versa. The approach in this book embraces drill-down/pop-up behavior by describing models that have various levels of abstraction, from architecture to data structure design.




Design It!


Book Description

Don't engineer by coincidence-design it like you mean it! Filled with practical techniques, Design It! is the perfect introduction to software architecture for programmers who are ready to grow their design skills. Lead your team as a software architect, ask the right stakeholders the right questions, explore design options, and help your team implement a system that promotes the right -ilities. Share your design decisions, facilitate collaborative design workshops that are fast, effective, and fun-and develop more awesome software! With dozens of design methods, examples, and practical know-how, Design It! shows you how to become a software architect. Walk through the core concepts every architect must know, discover how to apply them, and learn a variety of skills that will make you a better programmer, leader, and designer. Uncover the big ideas behind software architecture and gain confidence working on projects big and small. Plan, design, implement, and evaluate software architectures and collaborate with your team, stakeholders, and other architects. Identify the right stakeholders and understand their needs, dig for architecturally significant requirements, write amazing quality attribute scenarios, and make confident decisions. Choose technologies based on their architectural impact, facilitate architecture-centric design workshops, and evaluate architectures using lightweight, effective methods. Write lean architecture descriptions people love to read. Run an architecture design studio, implement the architecture you've designed, and grow your team's architectural knowledge. Good design requires good communication. Talk about your software architecture with stakeholders using whiteboards, documents, and code, and apply architecture-focused design methods in your day-to-day practice. Hands-on exercises, real-world scenarios, and practical team-based decision-making tools will get everyone on board and give you the experience you need to become a confident software architect.




97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know


Book Description

In this truly unique technical book, today's leading software architects present valuable principles on key development issues that go way beyond technology. More than four dozen architects -- including Neal Ford, Michael Nygard, and Bill de hOra -- offer advice for communicating with stakeholders, eliminating complexity, empowering developers, and many more practical lessons they've learned from years of experience. Among the 97 principles in this book, you'll find useful advice such as: Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar) Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm) Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards) Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney) For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde) It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons) To be successful as a software architect, you need to master both business and technology. This book tells you what top software architects think is important and how they approach a project. If you want to enhance your career, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know is essential reading.




Large-Scale Software Architecture


Book Description

The purpose of large-scale software architecture is to capture and describe practical representations to make development teams more effective. In this book the authors show how to utilise software architecture as a tool to guide the development instead of capturing the architectural details after all the design decisions have been made. * Offers a concise description of UML usage for large-scale architecture * Discusses software architecture and design principles * Technology and vendor independent




Software Architecture in Practice


Book Description

This is the eagerly-anticipated revision to one of the seminal books in the field of software architecture which clearly defines and explains the topic.




Software Architecture


Book Description

As a software architect you work in a wide-ranging and dynamic environment. You have to understand the needs of your customer, design architectures that satisfy both functional and non-functional requirements, and lead development teams in implementing the architecture. And it is an environment that is constantly changing: trends such as cloud computing, service orientation, and model-driven procedures open up new architectural possibilities. This book will help you to develop a holistic architectural awareness and knowledge base that extends beyond concrete methods, techniques, and technologies. It will also help you to acquire or expand the technical, methodological, and social competences that you need. The authors place the spotlight on you, the architect, and offer you long-term architectural orientation. They give you numerous guidelines, checklists, and best practices to support you in your practical work. "Software Architecture" offers IT students, software developers, and software architects a holistic and consistent orientation across relevant topics. The book also provides valuable information and suggestions for system architects and enterprise architects, since many of the topics presented are also relevant for their work. Furthermore, IT project leads and other IT managers can use the book to acquire an enhanced understanding of architecture. Further information is available at www.software-architecture-book.org.