Customer Reviews

Large-Scale Software Architecture: A Practical Guide using UML

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

[Review duplicated from Amazon.co.uk]

Jeff Garland and Richard Anthony have written a very practical and accessible explanation of the process of designing and describing the software architecture for a large information system. All of the major architectural structures are covered and the depth of experience of the authors is evident from the solid, practical advice given throughout. There is also a huge amount of practical advice as to how architectural structures can be described using UML, which is particularly valuable.

The only significant criticism I've have is that they don't talk about the quality properties of the architecture all that explicitly. The focus in most of the book is about capturing architectural structures rather than talking about the required architectural qualities that led to the structures being selected. The reader is left to discern this for themselves.

This said though, I'd still recommend the book to any practicing information systems architect.

This book presents a very practical guide to designing and developing large-scale software systems. I've been involved in a number of large-scale projects and this is the first book I've found that includes many of the things you usually find out the hard way. Things like how to effectively communicate the design to the team, how to manage iterations and how to document designs and changes to the design.

Since the topic is large-scale systems, the book focuses more on techniques than on specific examples, but it more than makes up for that by providing practical tips and recommended reading references. If you are leading a software development team or plan to, this book will help you on a very practical level.

An excellent reference on what UML diagrams to use to capture the achitecture of a large software project. And this isn't based on the authors' ivory-tower opinions, but on their actual experience of using these diagrams in the real world. We have since used their approach to successfully capture (and thereby communicate to others) the architecture of software projects at our company.

The writing style is a bit dry (there are no humorous anecdotes), but this is more than made up for by being concise.

The book also includes an excellent primer of the various roles a software architect (and other software managers) should take within a large project.

This book is not pretentious about what it tries to do. It has no grandiose notions of explaining theories behind architecture, capturing history of the field, how to select architecture to enhance certain architectural qualities, trade offs to consider or patterns to choose from.

It is simply a guide on what architectural views are more relevant than others when trying to build large scale systems, what the view points guiding the generation of those views are, how to use these views effectively when guiding software projects. This it does admirably well, to the point.

It does point to other reference material of relevance for other topics on architecture that is useful for deeper knowledge.

Apart from avoiding pitfalls, this is a good book to help train senior developers and leads who want to move to architect roles. Also helps in developing shared vision on architectural deliverables to be generated among stakeholders.

4 Stars since it is rather pricey.