But more important, an understanding of what kind of information to capture about an architecture, beyond what notation to use, has emerged. Now it is firmly entrenched, a reality reflected by all-new diagrams. When the first edition was published, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was just arriving on the scene. In the first edition, we briefly mentioned a tool set (Dali) and its uses in the re-engineering context in in this edition the topic merits its own chapter.ĭocumenting software architectures is another topic that has matured considerably in the recent past.

It can be used as a portion of a design project, an analysis project, or to provide input into a decision process to determine what to use as a basis for reconstructing an existing system. Three new chapters treat understanding quality requirements, achieving qualities, and theattribute driven design (ADD) method, respectively.Īrchitecture reconstruction or reverse engineering is an essential activity for capturing undocumented architectures. The capturing of quality requirements, the achievement of those requirements through small-scale and large-scale architectural approaches (tactics and patterns, respectively), and a design method that reflects knowledge of how to achieve qualities are all captured in various chapters. The ATAM has been adopted by industrial organizations as a technique for evaluating their software architectures.Īrchitecture design has also had major developments since the first edition. This is reflected by a new chapter about the architecture tradeoff analysis method (ATAM). Architecture analysis has developed into a mature field with industrial-strength methods. We reflect the new developments with new case studies and the new understanding both through new chapters and through additions to and elaboration of the existing chapters.Īrchitecture analysis, design, reconstruction, and documentation have all had major developments since the first edition. Our goals for this second edition are the same, but the passage of time since the writing of the first edition has brought new developments in the field and new understanding of the important underpinnings of software architecture. And third, we wanted to explain the importance of software architecture in achieving the quality goals for a system.

Second, we wanted to establish and show the strong connection between an architecture and an organization's business goals. First, we wanted to show through authentic case studies actual examples of software architectures solving real-world problems. Our goals for the first edition were threefold.

Software architecture len bass