OK, What Would *You* Draw?
April 21st, 2008
A year and a bit ago, I posted pictures of DrProject‘s database schema and architecture. I’m happy with the former — the only thing I’d do differently is make it larger and add comments (or change field names to be more descriptive) — but the latter still bugs me. It doesn’t carry as much information as a napkin sketch of a user interface, much less an architectural blueprint. I’ve looked at lots of books on software architecture (Reekie & McAdam and Gorton being my favorites), but I still haven’t found a notation that seems like good value for time. If you know of one, I’d welcome a pointer…
I kind of like the scheme we were taught in our Agile class last year. Draw *four* pictures: the logical view; the deployment view; the process view; and the data view. Each one is part of the whole, but together they create the picture without any complicated notation or squirrely diagrams…
I like Harald’s suggestion. This is Kruchten’s “4+1″ view model of software architecture (IEEE Software 12, November 1995). The “+1″ is for selected scenarios that illustrate the architecture. URL: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/teaching/papers/4+1view-architecture.pdf
I tried Kruchten’s “4+1″ twice in my Software Architecture course — we/they always found the physical view included the process view, though the “conceptual architecture” view from Reekie & McAdam’s book seemed to appeal more. Unfortunately, the latter is almost free-form…