This blog: what's in it for you?

The motive behind this blog is to expose the human aspects of the software architecture discipline and how they fit into the overall software development process. Due to purposeful omission of technology specific details the blog targets programmers, developers, project managers, students, interns, junior and seasoned software architects alike.

Some of the observations and conclusions may seem obvious and familiar as they have been documented in classical software engineering books such as Fred P. Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Roger S. Pressman’s Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, and Ian Sommerville’s Software Engineering. Further, some of the problems & solutions may not seem to be architectural in nature at all. That’s precisely the point. The goal of the prose is to expose the obvious and to prod the reader to ask oneself if a given scenario or a point of view is applicable to own situation. If just one reader sees personal value in pursuing a solution, or asking subsequent questions, then the objective of the blog post has been fulfilled.

The architecture of a software system is only as good as its implementation. In a fictional world an architect may pause the time and retreat from the real world to come up with the perfect architecture. The software engineering world in the trenches is far from that. A practicing architect is subject to tangible forces such as budgets, schedules, resources, and intangible forces such as “the bus problem” and politics. It is our hope that through concrete solutions and through philosophical discussion the reader will have appropriate ammunition tackle the problems are relevant to his or her role in the software development lifecycle.