Customer Reviews

Systems Architecting: Creating & Building Complex Systems

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Rechtin is no stranger to architecting complex systems. Most of his insights are drawn from his 40 years experience as the chief architect for NASA during the moon landings and a long list of defence and civil positions.

The book covers a wide range of topics germane to architects as a field and profession: boundaries and interfaces, information systems, the challenge of ultra-quality, economics and public policy, AI, assessing architectures are some of the sections.

The style of the book is alomost memoir-like. He groups his experiences into three main headings with many sub headings. Each item within the sub headings rate 2-4 pages with some heuristic attached. It's a fascinating read because it's a rare glimpse into the mind of someone whose job it was to "keep the entire system in his head". He basically had to answer and implement a system that solved the question, "How do we get three men to the moon and back before the end of the decade?".

The two most useful aspects are his in depth treatment on the economics and politics of architecting and a multitude(over 100) heuristics. For instance,

"the greatest **leverage** in system architecting is at the interfaces" "complex systems will develop and evolve within and overall architecture much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms than if there are not" "profit is a matter of definition and cost is not an absolute" "there is no such thing as immaculate communication"

and my favourite

"the time in days, T, to obtain an approval requiring N signatures is approximately T = 2^(N-2).

The book has been in print for some time and many of the examples regarding designing jet propulsion systems, fail-safe computers for the moon or road networks may not be easily related to accounting, manufacturing or web systems. But as a blueprint for a profession that is growing in importance, it lays an anectdotal foundation that will be hard to match.

Systems architecting is the use of architecting tools and techniques (e.g.,analysis, insights, heuristics metaphors, practice, ethics and modus operandi) to systems (collections of different things which collectively produce results not producible by the components, alone. This is the first and most fundamental of three books on the subject. The second extends architecting to software, progressive modeling, politics, and architects in industry. The third uses the art of systems architecting in structuring organizations.