Software Systems Architecture
I have co-authored a book, “Software Systems Architecture” (Addison-Wesley, 2005, 2012), with Eoin Woods.
The book, which is in its second edition, is a practitioner-oriented guide to designing and implementing effective architectures for information systems.
It is both a readily accessible introduction to software architecture and an invaluable handbook of well-established best practices.
It shows why the role of the architect is central to any successful information systems development project, and, by presenting a set of architectural viewpoints and perspectives, provides specific direction for improving your own and your organisation’s approach to software systems architecture.
Concepts
The book identifies three key architectural concepts that we use as themes throughout the text:
Stakeholders are the people for whom we build systems.
A key part of my role as an architect is knowing how to work with stakeholders in order to create an architecture that meets their complex, overlapping, and often conflicting needs.
Viewpoints (and views) are an approach to structuring the architecture definition process and the architectural description, based on the principle of separation of concerns.
Viewpoints contain proven architectural knowledge which I use to guide the creation of an architecture, described in a particular set of views (each view being the result of applying the guidance in a particular viewpoint).
Perspectives are a complementary concept to viewpoints that we introduced in the book.
Perspectives contain proven architectural knowledge and help me structure the architecture definition process, by separating concerns but focusing on cross-structural quality properties rather than architectural structures.
Find Out More
Click on this link to find out more about the book.
You can also download a Quick Reference Card or Architecture Description template which you can use to document your own architecture.
Other Published Work
Over the years I have presented at a number of conferences, including BCS SPA (Software Practice Advancement special interest group) and IASA (the International Association of Software Architects), where I am also an IASA Fellow.
I have in the past also written a number of articles for print and online magazines, some of which may still even be in existence! I am an occasional reviewer of academic papers on architecture-related subjects.
SrvStart
You can find my open-source SrvStart software on GitHub here. Please note that I no longer support SrvStart.