Software Architecture

While I was reading this chapter, I found that I already knew or at least had heard of most of the concepts that the author goes through, but I hadn’t seen them all in one single place. I liked that about it, the way it explains software architecture in a practical or at least concise. Having said that, I would expect this book’s target audience to be people that don’t have as much formal education on software engineering as we (all CS students at Tec de Monterrey) do. The reason for that judgement is that it doesn’t go into much detail and just breezes through a bunch of concepts and definitions sort of like it was a reference manual that you could open when you forgot something simple but doesn’t add much to our pretty comprehensive software engineering classes. I mean, we don’t take three or more semesters worth of software engineering subjects to not know this kind of stuff. Maybe it’s an introductory chapter and the author will go into detail later but as it stands isolated in this reading assignment it may be too simple although still interesting and a good read, particularly because of the style the author writes in that I liked. One point he makes that I think is very important and cannot be stressed enough is that the architectural specification should always stay up to date. Having worked in a handful of companies of different sizes I think a lot of people either forget that or don’t think it’s that important but it really is, specially for new members of a team having some peace of documentation that shows what the component you are coding/maintaining does and how it interacts with other components is invaluable; it saves you time, effort and helps you make changes that make more sense for the system as a whole.

Goodliffe, P. (2007). Software Architecture. In Code craft: The practice of writing excellent code. San Francisco: No Starch Press. Retrieved from https://learning.oreilly.com/home/.