Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions
Successfully managing the relationship between business and technology is a daunting task faced by all companies in the twenty-first century. Beyond Software Architecture is a practical guide to properly managing this mission-critical relationship. In our modern economy, every software decision can have a significant impact on business; conversely, most business decisions will influence a software application's viability. This book contains keen insights and useful lessons about creating winning software solutions in the context of a real-world business.
Software should be designed to deliver value to an organization, but all too often it brings turmoil instead. Powerful applications are available in the marketplace, but purchasing or licensing these technologies does not guarantee success. Winning solutions must be properly integrated into an organization's infrastructure.
Software expert Luke Hohmann teaches you the business ramifications of software-architecture decisions, and further instructs you on how to understand and embrace the business issues that must be resolved to achieve software success. Using this book as a roadmap, business managers and development teams can safely navigate the minefield of important decisions that they face on a regular basis. The resulting synergy between business and technology will allow you to create winning technology solutions, and ensure your organization's success—now and in the future.
Review By: Michelle Carrier
06/23/2010After reading this book, I reconsidered some projects I worked on in the past. As an analyst in quality-assurance, I’ve been involved in few projects where the technical challenge took priority over the original objective. I’d like at those moments to propose some of the arguments of this book. This is one of the best structured books than I've read on this subject to date. It explains us why it is necessary to join together two worlds which often evolve in a parallel way and sometimes even competing worlds. It goes on to say that collaborating is the only way to avoid the loss of contact with the customer. If the technology that is developed does not correspond to the customer requirements, that it is utterly useless.
The organization of the book makes reference work easy. The end of each chapter includes a section entitled, "Check This/Try This" which is very helpful. At the end of the book, the release checklist is extremely useful and shows you how to better plan for the launch of a product. The solutions suggested in this book are realizable, effective, and beneficial for small companies.
A better collaboration between marketing, development, and QA is key to developing better products. QA people want the best product possible and this is not summarized only with the absence of bugs but also with best releasing the best
products for the customer.
This book speaks about the risks teams face when they concentrate only on the architecture of a system. The book brings suggestions on points often ignored during the development: distribution, licensing, security, maintenance,and training. The guiding principle is the association of two groups: architects of systems (architect) and marketing (markitect). When developers lose the contact with the customer the price paid is very high and can even prove fatal.
In short, this is an excellent book, that I advise every QA team member to read and add to their toolbox.