A Software Architecture Primer,   ISBN:9780646458410

Customer Rating: 

A Software Architecture Primer beautifully describes a small set of light-weight practices that can streamline and systematize your software design process without bogging you down in a beureaucratic process.

Usually when I think of software engineering process, I think of a set of burdensome tasks that drag me down and make it more difficult to explore or change my design. Each design change can result in hours or days updating countless documents, recommunicating those changes in reviews, and so on. At the same time, it is usefult to have a structure for fleshing out a software design and communicating it to your team.

In contrast to most other authors I've read in this space, Reekie and McAdam realize that there is a tension between process (structure) and getting real work done. So rather than going on and on about the minutiae of different software design formalisms and whatnot, they clearly and succinctly describe a set of techniques and exercises that will help you systematically design better software and communicate your design to others without slowing you down. This is the first software architecture book that I will actually put to practice in my next software project, rather than picking and choosing from the huge body of literature in this space.