Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives Review

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Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives ReviewWhen it comes to the systems or software architecture, I subscribe to Tom Demarco's definition: "An architecture is a framework for the disciplined introduction of change." (http://www.systemsguild.com/GuildSite/TDM/Architecture.html). And while most of the job postings matching "architect" these days talk about the need for writing and testing code, there is a growing awareness in the industry that in order to build a resilient enterprise system an organization must look beyond design patterns and coding idioms. In addition to the technical challenges, building large enterprise system requires effort of many professionals during an extended period of time. This brings other non-technical risks into the picture.
This is one of the better books covering many issues that comprise System Architecture discipline in the light of their personal experience. The authors introduce us to an approach for partitioning architecture using Viewpoints (behavioral characteristics, e.g. Functional, Information, Concurrency, Development, Deployment, Operational) and Perspectives (nonfunctional aspects, e.g. Security, Performance and Scalability, Availability and Resilience, Evolution).
The first half of the book describes the discipline of Application Software Architecture, the second half contains two catalogs, one for Viewpoints and the other for Perspectives. Both catalogs describe concerns, artifacts (models), problems and pitfalls when focusing on a viewpoint or perspective.
I would qualify this book as a companion and reference for a beginner through intermediate level. It gives an excellent overview of what a system architect has to go through day in and day out to achieve success. The book contains a wealth of advice on what to pay and not pay attention to in any particular stage of the architectural development. The authors clearly speak from personal experience. Their examples are always to the point, although a bit sketchy with respect to details on techniques and artifacts and how to develop and use them. Considering the site of the volume, the authors did an excellent job balancing width and depth of coverage: trying to cover such a vast discipline in detail in a 500+-page book is not possible.Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives Overview
Software Systems Architecture is a practitioner-oriented guide to designing and implementing effective architectures for information systems. It is both a readily accessible introduction to software architecture and an invaluable handbook of well-established best practices. It shows why the role of the architect is central to any successful information-systems development project, and, by presenting a set of architectural viewpoints and perspectives, provides specific direction for improving your own and your organization's approach to software systems architecture.

With this book you will learn how to

Design an architecture that reflects and balances the different needs of its stakeholders
Communicate the architecture to stakeholders and demonstrate that it has met their requirements
Focus on architecturally significant aspects of design, including frequently overlooked areas such as performance,resilience, and location
Use scenarios and patterns to drive the creation and validation of your architecture
Document your architecture as a set of related views
Use perspectives to ensure that your architecture exhibits important qualities such as performance, scalability, and security

The architectural viewpoints and perspectives presented in the book also provide a valuable long-term reference source for new and experienced architects alike.

Whether you are an aspiring or practicing software architect, you will find yourself referring repeatedly to the practical advice in this book throughout the lifecycle of your projects.

A supporting Web site containing further information can be found at www.viewpoints-and-perspectives.info


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The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing Roi With Just-in-time Processes and Documentation Review

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The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing Roi With Just-in-time Processes and Documentation Review
"The business value of agile software methods" is an important book. It takes existing research in the return of agile methods and tries to quantify them into different financial measures. However, I personally was not a big fan of the book as it all felt a little too good to be true. Next to that, the book contained some parts that, in my opinion, are clear misunderstandings about Agile methods. I'll mention some of these at the end of this review.
The book is only about 200 pages and contains 24 short chapters. The initial chapters provide an overview of agile methods, different types, their history and some of the different practices. Chapter 11 does an ... rather interesting... comparison of different agile methods. Chapter 12 discusses what kind of metrics would be applicable for measuring agile methods and why they are different from traditional methods.
Most of the research work starts in chapter 13. This chapter summarizes the results of different agile development surveys that were done. Then chapter 14 introduces cost/benefits of Agile methods (on which the further calculations are based). These are done for five groups "pair programming", "test-driven development," "Extreme Programming," "Scrum," and "Agile Methods (in general)". Chapter 15 discusses the different metrics that will be calculated in Chapter 17-22 which are Cost, Benefit, ROI, NPV, and Real Options Analysis. All chapters show an enormous ROI for implementing agile methods. Chapter 22 summarizes the earlier chapters, 23 does a comparison with traditional methods (CMM) and 24 is a closing chapter that speculates about the future of Agile methods.
When reading this book, I had a couple of annoyances, a couple wrong things, and a couple metrics that seem unbelievable to me.
I'll start with some annoyances. The book is extremely repetitive--it could probably have written in 20% of the current text. The most annoying repetition was the sentence "Agile methods use right-sized, just-enough, and just-in-time x to maximize business value." This sentence is repeated over and over again. I'm not a fan of this kind of popular language, but the repetition made it much worst. Other annoyances were minor. For example the author keeps repeating that a Scrum cycle is 30 days, but then in the Scrum explanation says 2-4 weeks (which is more common nowadays).
Then some misinformed sentences. The description of test-driven development was shallow and missed the design aspect of TDD. For example, the authors state (p38) "test-driven development is a form of dynamic analysis, quality assurance, and verification and validation"... completely missing the -driven part. Similarly, the practice of simple design is not explained well (p51). The authors state that simple design relates to having the fewest number of methods and classes whereas, in my experience, simple design often lead to more methods and classes... just a lot smaller ones. More serious, on p79, the authors propose methods related to working software... but not of the proposed metrics relate to... working software. Instead they suggest metrics such as iteration size, iteration frequency, operational/validated iterations (no clue what that means).
Then to the disbelieve. My first observation was that all the ROI metrics were very positive. For example the ROI of pair programming is 1500% !! I pair program often, enjoy it, and think it has a positive ROI... but 1500% sounds a little high to me. I don't have the facts to challenge this number, its the only number I've seen... it just seems too good to be true. Which does brings me to the subject... it was a little unclear to me what data this was based on.
Even with the above critique, this was not a bad book. Considering that the goal of the book was *not* to describe agile methods but to describe the research of the authors related to the ROI of Agile methods. In fact, this is an important job and will definitively help people who are not interested in knowing the details but need to make decisions on whether to try-out agile development or not. For that reason, I'll go for 3 stars. If you do not have the need to convince anyone with these numbers, then I would not recommend reading this book. If you do need to convince someone, then perhaps the ROI calculations in this book will help.
The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing Roi With Just-in-time Processes and Documentation OverviewThe Business Value of Agile Software Methods offers a comprehensive methodologyfor quantifying the costs and benefits of using agile methods to create innovative software products and shows a complete business value comparison between traditional and agile methods. It provides a roadmap for linking agile methods tomajor industry standards such as the project management, systems, and software engineering bodies of knowledge and identifies a set of critical factors for succeedingwith agile methods every time.Key Features:--Identifies the major types and kinds of agile methods, along with the major forms of best practices, as a pretext for mixing and matching them to create super-hybrids--Introduces a complete family of metrics, models, and measurements for estimating the costs, benefits, return on investment, and net present value of agile methods, and includes numerous how to examples--Provides the first comprehensive compilation of cost and benefits data on agile methods from an analysis of hundreds of research studies, and introduces and illustrates the industrys first top-down parametric models for estimating agilemethods costs and benefits--WAV offers numerous free downloadable training and consulting briefings, cost and benefit spreadsheets, release planning templates, metrics for agilemethods, and an ROI/business value calculator available from the WebAdded Value Download Resource Center at jrosspub.com

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