Applied Software Architecture : A Practical Guide for Software Designers

"Designing a large software system is an extremely complicated undertaking that requires juggling differing perspectives and differing goals, and evaluating differing options. Applied Software Architecture is the best book yet that gives guidance as to how to sort out and organize the conflicting pressures and produce a successful design." -- Len Bass, author of Software Architecture in Practice.

Quality software architecture design has always been important, but in today's fast-paced, rapidly changing, and complex development environment, it is essential. A solid, well-thought-out design helps to manage complexity, to resolve trade-offs among conflicting requirements, and, in general, to bring quality software to market in a more timely fashion.

Applied Software Architecture provides practical guidelines and techniques for producing quality software designs. It gives an overview of software architecture basics and a detailed guide to architecture design tasks, focusing on four fundamental views of architecture--conceptual, module, execution, and code. Through four real-life case studies, this book reveals the insights and best practices of the most skilled software architects in designing software architecture. These case studies, written with the masters who created them, demonstrate how the book's concepts and techniques are embodied in state-of-the-art architecture design. You will learn how to:

* create designs flexible enough to incorporate tomorrow's technology; * use architecture as the basis for meeting performance, modifiability, reliability, and safety requirements; * determine priorities among conflicting requirements and arrive at a successful solution; and * use software architecture to help integrate system components.

Anyone involved in software architecture will find this book a valuable compendium of best practices and an insightful look at the critical role of architecture in software development.

Christine Hofmeister is a project manager at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) in Princeton, New Jersey. Since joining Siemens, Dr. Hofmeister has balanced research in software architecture with design and development of industrial applications, focusing in particular on applications for the power generation industry. Her other research interests are distributed programming environments, software reconfigurability, and re-engineering software architectures.

Robert L. Nord, a member of the software architecture program at SCR, designs and evaluates software architectures for large-scale industrial systems. Dr. Nord, currently the Siemens industrial resident affiliate at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Pittsburgh, is working on methods for architecture trade-off analysis and product-line practices. His other interests include transitioning software design practices, improving architecture practices using software architecture improvement groups, and architecture-based development.

Dilip Soni holds the position of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at SCR where he designs and evaluates software architectures for industrial systems. His focus of interest has been medical, power generation and distribution, and industrial automation systems. Dr. Soni is currently working on design and verification of component-based control systems and architectures for integrated enterprises. His other interests include traditional music, folk dancing, and nonviolent communication. 0201325713AB03062002