Praise for the First Edition of Documenting Software Architectures

“For many years, box and line diagrams have decorated the text that describes system implementations. These diagrams can be evocative, sometimes inspirational, occasionally informative, but are rarely precise and never complete. Recent years have brought appreciation for the importance of a deliberate structural design, or architecture, for a system. Now, in Documenting Software Architectures, we have guidance for capturing that knowledge, both to aid design and—perhaps more significantly—to inform subsequent maintainers, who hold over half the total cost of a system’s software in their hands. Half of this cost goes into figuring out how the system is organized and where to make the change. A documented architecture is the essential roadmap for the system, leading the maintainer through the implementation jungle.”

—Mary Shaw, Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Coauthor of Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline

“Multiple software architecture views are essential because of the diverse set of stakeholders (users, acquirers, developers, testers, maintainers, inter-operators, and others) needing to understand and use the architecture from their viewpoint. Achieving consistency among such views is one of the most challenging and difficult problems in the software architecture field. This book is a tremendously valuable first step in defining analyzable software architecture views and frameworks for integrating them.”

—Barry Boehm, TRW Professor of Software Engineering
Director, USC Center for Software Engineering

“There is probably no better set of authors to write this book. The material is readable. It uses humor effectively. It is nicely introspective when appropriate, and yet in the end it is forthright and decisive. The philosophical elements of the book are fascinating. The authors consider concepts that few others even are aware of, present the issues related to those concepts, and then resolve them! This is a tour de force on the subject of architectural documentation.”

—Robert Glass, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Systems and Software
Editor/Publisher, The Software Practitioner

“We found this book highly valuable for our work with our business units and would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the needs for and improve their skills in describing software architectures for complex systems.”

—Steffen Thiel, Robert Bosch Corporation

“Since our projects involve numerous stakeholders, documenting the architecture from various views is of particular importance. For this task, this book provides pragmatic and well-structured guidance and will be an important reference for industrial practice.”

—Martin Simons, Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology

“Software architecture is an abstract representation of the most essential design decisions. It is expressed using concepts that are not directly visible in software implementation. How to identify these decisions? How to represent them? How to find the concepts that make complex software understandable? This excellent book is written by a group of expert architects sharing their experience and understanding of useful architectural concepts, essential design decisions, and practical ways to represent architectural views of complex software.”

—Alexander Ran, Principal Scientist of Software Architecture, Nokia

“I particularly appreciate the major theme of the book: that a software architecture consists of a variety of different structures, each defined by a set of elements and a relationship among those elements. I further appreciate the authors pointing out why the diagrams that seem so beloved by today’s software designers are often deceptive and of little value. (I frequently say that in software engineering every diagram takes a thousand words to explain it.) It was also refreshing to see an explanation of why ‘levels of abstraction,’ a favorite term of many software designers, is an empty phrase. These are just a few of the elements that made me impatient to see this book published.”

—David Weiss, Director of Software Technology Research, Avaya Laboratories

“The authors have written a solid book that discusses many of the most important issues facing software designers. They point out many decisions that can be considered, discussed, and made before coding begins to provide guidance for the programmers. These issues are far more important than most of the decisions that programmers focus on. Properly made and documented, the decisions discussed in this book will guide programmers throughout the remainder of the software development process.”

—David Parnas, Director of the Software Engineering Programme, McMaster University