Software Architecture in Practice

Being a Software Architect, I can certainly appreciate the work that the authors of this book (L. Bass, P. Clements, R Kazman) have put into this book. Software Architecture in Practice is probably the best book that I have read on the theory and practice of architecture design and software engineering. There is no fair way for me to review this book as it is PACKED with useful information from beginning to the very end. It has a combination of high-level architectural concepts tailored with best software engineering practices. It is not a complete book on software engineering, but it wasn't meant to be - it's meant to cover a very specific topic in software engineering and it does so extremely well. It is a text in which the concepts architecting software applications, evaluating architectures thru various methods, and case studies of major leaps in software architecture have been very well described; depicted and well evaluated. The book is written from an architect's point of view, and it shows how an architect or a group of architects can make or break an organization, and what they need to do in order to be successful. The authors of this book explain why simply architecting something is not good enough and lots of work needs to be done before and after the architectural phase to ensure the quality and the success of the project. This aspect of the book is simply priceless. The author start by describing software architecture as:"The Software Architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which compromise software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships between them."Throughout the book, the author used this definition to describe various aspects of architecture. One of the methods/techniques that the author uses is called the Architecture Business Cycle (ABC). ABC is method of realizing the "things" that influence the architect and in-turn the architecture - known as the circle of influences. This concept, ABC, is used for all the case studies mentioned in this book: · A case study on a system that have extreme safety requirements - the Air traffic control.· A case study on a system with high level of distribution of its subsystems - A flight simulator · A case study in which it was essential for the organization to be able to share documents instantaneously.· A case study on an organization where one architecture lead to a product line of applications· A case study on the need to standardization of architectural approaches across organizations and the community - J2EE and the EJB.For each case study, the authors depict its ABC and give the reader the reason, business reason, that this project got started to begin with. The reader then walks thru a series of decision-making steps that led to the architecture that was finally chosen. The drivers of the project, the business reason, the architect[s], and the organization are all linked and t

My recent software engineering graduate course on software architecture relied mainly on this SEI text, along with several of the many SEI white papers posted on the SEI site, and such texts as Buschmann's Pattern Oriented Software Architecture (POSA) and Stelting/Maassen's Applied Java Patterns. Since the second edition of the text was available just two weeks after the start of the course, I decided not to purchase the first edition, and instead purchased the second edition. However, having used both editions for the course, I must say that the second edition is superior to the first even when only taking the architectural view notation into account (it uses UML rather than a cryptic, proprietary notation used in the first edition, although at this high of a level in modeling, UML sometimes disappoints as well). The addition of content from some SEI white papers to the text is also a benefit of the second edition. The text, regardless of the edition, is well written and very understandable.

This book has only a few hundred pages. It took me still two months to read through it. Every sentence is loaded with information. A lot of important statements are stuffed into lists and tables. This gives the book excellent reference qualities and this makes the book quite a hard read, especially after work.The content is relevant, clearly described and trustworthy. It has very little references to alternative views on the subject.I am still looking for a good introductory fat book on software architecture.

I found this volume to be extremely useful. It contains very insightful commentary on what architecture is (a term that I find is misused a lot), what architecture affects, and how to evaluate the qualities of an architecture.Two of their best insights for me:* Architecture affects the organization of the company/business unit. (In my company, we didn't realize this and we failed to create an organization that could support the architecture.)* Virtually any architecture can accomplish the functional needs of a system - what differentiates architectures are how they provide the essential qualities (performance, modifiability, maintainibility, etc.) to the product.The book is strongly based in the real-world, with practical examples. I never felt they were straying into "theorectical" land.I also bought "Applied Software Architecture" but didn't like it nearly as much - I highly recommend "Software Architecture in Practice"!

This book is my bible with regards of software architecture. In previous S.E. courses, I heard about software architecture, but the notion never quite sank on my skull; perhaps because the notion itself required a course on itself, or in this case, a book. A minor problem is that the book does not use UML; however, the diagrams the authors use are easy to understand. More importantly, I find the narrative is as good as the diagrams themselves. I almost never have to look at the diagrams to understand the notions. Tumbs up to the authors!