An ADR is a log entry about the architecture decisions that have been made and that lead to the state of the architecture as it is now or as it is intended to be in the future. I don’t think its possible to use those tools to have an auto generated application map. It also documents the major technologies used and how the containers communicate. A software architecture document is a high-level map. The heart of the book is an introduction to the most relevant architectural views, grouped into three major families (which we call viewtypes ) along with practical guidance about how to write them down. Documenting Software Architectures Software architecture has become a widely accepted conceptual basis for the development of nontrivial software in all application areas and by organizations of all sizes. Yes, I feel exactly the same pain as you. And because of that, the document won’t need to change much either. Change ). A function to create a post would expect all relevant data to create a Post structure in it. This report compares the Software Engineering Institute's Views and Beyond approach for documenting software architectures with the documentation philosophy embodied in agile software-development methods. Very … Documenting Software Architectures การนำเอกสารไปใช้ (ประโยชน์) 1. In order to achieve that, the first step is to list what happens in a component when a specific capability is triggered. An Application Map starts by defining the components of the application, the domain wise modules, like “Billing”, “User”, “Company”, “Orders”, “Products”, and so on. static.content.url=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/js/artrating/, ArticleTitle=Documenting software architecture, Part 1: What software architecture is, and why it's important to document it. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. different views, or aspects, that you should document for any medium- to Two different kinds of architectural … So, we can and should use UML, but for the situations it should be used: to describe patterns, small portions of an application in detail, or high granularity views of the application with low detail (not using class diagrams). Personally I prefer source-trackable documentation formats, but have historically steered away from generated documentation because it seems to lack readability or go out of date. We always need to understand the tools, and use no more and no less than what we need. Software architecture has increasingly become important for the development of complex real-time systems. The future of software development will involve self-documenting architectures that are easier to learn, easier to evolve, and maybe will even partially design themselves. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. It would also not make sense for an event to depend on a service. The Component dependencies diagram is aimed at making sure that the application components and modules are decoupled. 2. This is important because the application map should make visible the connections between components as well as what they mean and any followup side effects, and for this we need to expose the services that wiring to other components and their names (which should express what they do). By listener I mean a class whose public methods are all independently triggered by only one type of event, they focus on the event. We hold that documenting software architecture is primarily about documenting the relevant views, and then augmenting this information with relevant information that applies across views. Most likely one would opt for something like queues or channels to give other functions an opportunity to react to a new post without having to explicitly model events and building up use cases as a data flow were functions participate – independently. That’s why I have the “OpenOrderCommand”, and it can be triggered manually or by an event handler. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. No human will understand such a map generated for a mid-to-large sized system. Any technical or non-technical person can clearly visualise what happens when any of the use cases of the application is triggered. I use SharedCore to name my business Shared Kernel namespace, and Domain.Core to name my business domain core interactions (the most inner layer of the architecture, that has no dependencies except the SharedCore. In the User component, we can see that when a post is created, its author is automatically subscribed to that post subjects (tags). We learn how to code and we build some cool applications, and then we learn about architecture and how to make the application maintainable for several years…. domain.commandhandlers.subdomain.MySubdomainCommandHandler.class In the case of a simple blog application, we could have two components, the “User” and the “Blog” components: In each of those components, we define what are the commands that can be issued to them. Events are great in these cases, but I noticed the business intents of the command handler is less explicit. Do note, however, that I added the colours myself as to make it easier to read in this blog post. At this level of granularity, we will see the containers of the application, where a container is any independent technical piece of the application, for example a mobile app, an API or a database. The difference between modules and components is that a module is any modular piece of the application, while a component is a domain wise module of the application. Software Architecture in Practice Second Edition Bass.book Page i Thursday, March 20, 2003 7:21 PM Third Edition . Components can be mapped to DDD bounded contexts and/or Microservices, which means they must be completely decoupled, physically and temporally, from other components. I may have done a bad design decision which do not facilitate source code navigation : event handlers are not allowed to have business code. how you should document software architecture. Three complementary views lay the foundation. Documenting Software Architectures, Second Edition, provides the most complete and current guidance, independent of language or notation, on how to capture an architecture in a … Documenting software architecture, Part Lisez « Documenting Software Architectures Views and Beyond » de Paul Clements disponible chez Rakuten Kobo. The dependency diagrams are useful to tell us about the dependencies that exist in the different types of code in our codebase. domain.eventhandlers.subdomain.MySubdomainEventHandler.class, domain.handlers.subdomain.MySubdomainCommandHandler.class I think the C4 Model is a great way to document applications architecture, it is great to understand the architecture of the application to a certain level, but I still find it insufficient, although it took me some time to put my finger in what is missing. I find it specially important that all the options under consideration be written down with their pros and cons, as to spark discussion and a clear decision. It’s an artefact that will take a lot of effort and time to get done and also to simply keep it up to date; We will still end up having a big diagram with a lot of lines on it, which is not the most readable. I think they all should be separate, and it should be clear what they are used for. I also feel there is too much information in that Application Map, making it very difficult to read, but I think the CLI application to generate the map could use filters to only put in the map the events or commands we want to visualize. It will quickly lose value if it’s too detailed (comprehensive). You are left with a description of modules that take data of form A and return data of form A’. In the case of the examples I have below, they were all generated by deptrac for my pet project (explicit-architecture-php), which I use for experimenting. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. The “User” component can create and delete users, while the “Blog” component can create and delete posts, and create comments to a post. Regards to autogeneration, there is a great PlantUML plugin for Archimate: https://github.com/ebbypeter/Archimate-PlantUML. เอกสารของ Architecture ในแต่ละโครงการจะเปลี่ยนไป . In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The idea is to use 4 different granularity (or zoom) levels for documenting software architecture: 1. illustrations may have changed. It was the difficulty to understand what code was being executed as a result of events that made me come up with the Application Map idea. The application map looks very interesting, and specifically for events and events handler. In the image below, we can see that deleting a post (“DeletePost”) will trigger the deletePost() method in the PostService, which is also triggered by a listener listening to the event that notifies that a user has been deleted. It would try to be a pure function and leave details like saving the post somewhere to other modules. Retrouvez Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond (2nd Edition) 2nd edition by Clements, Paul, Bachmann, Felix, Bass, Len, Garlan, David, I (2010) Hardcover et des millions de livres en stock sur Amazon.fr. Tilak Mitra. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series. I made this decision because, we may want to trigger the command manually too. So, it will be composed by one single box for the whole application, and it will be surrounded by other boxes that refer to the external systems and users the application interacts with. It is still very alpha because of the missing information, but also because it is not flexible when it comes to the code base it needs to analyse but, from the codebase of the company where I currently work at, it can generate something like this: If you are curious about the project, you can check it out here, however be advised that it is still very alpha, its just a proof of concept and I haven’t worked on it for a few months already. Noté /5. The Layer dependency diagram analyses the dependencies between layers, but within a layer there are still dependencies that must not occur. large-scale software development project. It won’t be up to date, it won’t be trusted, and it won’t be used. Documenting software architecture, Part 3, Develop the architecture overview. On the other hand, a “Billing” module is a component because it deals with domain concerns. To start, there are a few artefacts that we need to know: I have seen a few templates for creating ADRs, and I saw nice things in several of them, so I created my own template. There are several diagrams we can create using UML, and we can segregate them into two categories: I will not go into the details of each type of diagram because it would be too much to cover in this post, and there are plenty of resources out there documenting these diagram types. The separation between events and listeners in two different namespaces is because a component might triger an event but not listen to it, and it might listen to an event that it does not trigger, so they are somewhat independent, although I think it would be fine to put them together as well. Simple. Now, I have some trouble with events in my architecture, to the point I started to restrict/limit them until I find a solution. Retrouvez Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond (2nd Edition) by Paul Clements Felix Bachmann Len Bass David Garlan James Ivers Reed Little Paulo Merson Robert Nord Judith Stafford(2010-10-15) et des millions de livres en stock sur Amazon.fr. But I have different Input APIs like REST, File Upload, Database Sometimes, if there is some, it’s out-of-date, inap-propriate and basically not very useful. In this new series, learn why and how you should document software architecture. probably not…. Don't put data science notebooks into production. The C4 model was introduced by Simon Brown, and it’s the best idea about software architecture documentation that I’ve come across so far. However, the example below is not so useful… It’s very big, so it gets confusing and difficult to follow. . Thanks for the recommendation, I don’t know it, but i will definitely check it out. The best is to use it as the starting point for the discussion, as an RFC (Request For Comments), which is an idea/proposal that we submit to the other members of the team/department requesting their input/opinion/approval. It is less readable, you don’t know exactly what the handler is doing, because when you see `bus.emit(new SomethingHappened()), you have to search for all the event handlers handling this event to know exactly what the command is doing. I found it very helpful to have these different approaches cataloged together for easy reference. For example, if we want our events to be serializable, so that we can put them in a queue, we probably don’t want them to contain an entity because it would be problematic to unserialize it and persist it using an ORM. The Application Map is aimed at being truly a map of the application, defining its “cities” (Components), its “local roads” (use cases), “highways” (events), etc. The advantage of generated documentation is that we can generate it every time we need it, so basically removes tge issue of getting outdated. If we show those diagrams to a Product Owner, he will find them mostly useless for his role. The readability is indeed a problem, but there are ways of making it more readable, ie using filters to generate only what we are interested on. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Sometime, I send events from my command handler. They must issue command, which is then processed by the command handler (where reside the business), which add another level of indirection…. They don’t quite help us see what is wrong in our application codebase, in regards to promiscuous code relations and poor structure, which impacts modularity and encapsulation, essential to any engineering product; They don’t help us understand our codebase as a whole, what the application cog wheels can do and how they interact with each other. Core.Component.Application.Command. In my experience, on our line of work, all type of documentation gets outdated. The Architecture Decision Records (ADR) are actually not really about documenting the current, or future, state of an application architecture, but instead the reasons that led to it. This tells us that our application deletes posts as a result of either a direct command from a user or when a post author has been deleted. The idea is to use 4 different granularity (or zoom) levels for documenting software architecture: This is the highest granularity diagram. So, in the diagram below we can see, for example, that the Infrastructure layer, being one of the top outer layers, can depend on any other layer. The 4+1 Architectural view model was created by Philippe Kruchten and published, back in 1995, in his paper titled “Architectural Blueprints—The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture“. They are specially important because they intend to tell others, and our future selves, why the architecture is what it is. This will make it effortless to create such a diagram, remove the need for maintaining it, and make it virtually immediate to create it. This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. CRP – The Common Reuse Principle – Classes that are used together are packaged together. The best way to use an ADR is not simply as a document written after having a discussion and making a decision. Ideally, the namespaces/folder structure should communicate that on its own. From the developerWorks archives. introduces software architecture and the importance of documentation. Once your documentation is more oriented toward use-cases rather than static allocations, you can focus on dynamic aspects such as transaction, identity, authentication, and authorization boundaries. Documenting Software Architectures, Second Edition, provides the most complete and current guidance, independent of language or notation, on how to capture an architecture in a commonly understandable form. It has little detail but its main goal is to describe the context in which the application is. Following the services, we list all the event listeners in each component, even if they are not actually used, which is handy because then we can detect it and either fix whatever needs to be fixed or remove the unused code. The content is provided “as is.” Given the rapid evolution of technology, some content, steps, or illustrations may have changed. The component diagram shows us the components inside one container. Based on the authors' extensive experience, Documenting Software Architectures helps you decide what information to document, and then, with guidelines and examples (in various notations, including UML), shows you how to express an architecture in a form that everyone can understand. Specially important is that the two components (User and Blog, in mid-blue colour) are decoupled. You will learn about the five domain.handlers.subdomain.MySubdomainEventHandler.class. These services are relevant because, for example, they trigger an event or are used directly by another component. In order for this to work, the system needs to be correctly decomposed into components. If you feel it’s a worthy project and you have free time to contribute, let me know and I will try get you up to speed and create tasks that you can pick up to bring it to the next level. But like everything in software architecture, it have its tradeoff. But then the question remains, how do we document a full application?! – you need to provide an activity diagram for all use cases in your system. Furthermore, if we try to use one single class diagram to express the whole application we are asking for trouble. Yes, i do, but there must always be some way of detecting what types of code we have. Online Examination System (OES) Version: 1.0 Software Architecture Document Date: 08/04/2016 Confidential , 2016 Page 4 of 58 6.1.7 Lecturer creates a new MCQ 36 6.1.8 Lecturer creates a new essay question 37 6.1.9 Lecturer generates a MCQ paper using the MCQs that are already saved in the database. This article is very helpful to understand Hexagonal architecture as well, but still I am not able to make it link with my requirement. If you want to explore this subject more, I recommend heading to the Joel Parker Henderson github repository about ADRs. Documenting Software Architectures - eLearning. Great article. The Architecture Decision Records (ADR) are actually not really about documenting the current, or future, state of an application architecture, but instead the reasons that led to it. How do you mitigate the cost of generation? SomeUseCase.SomeCommand.class A central precept of the book is that documenting an architecture entails two essential steps: (1) documenting the set of relevant views of that architecture, and then completing the picture by (2) documenting information that transcends any single view. I have a similar architecture (decoupled, hexagonal, clean etc.) Good to know we are facing the same issue. Now I’m thinking about allowing the event handlers to have access to services/repositories/entities like the command handler. Software architectures, by definition, won’t change much over time. “Application Map” is something truly important in this profession, as developers come and go but knowledge must stay. A component is a domain wise module, a module that contains both Application and Domain layers. Where do you place your event handler in your code ? Now we have the information about the flow within a component, but we are still lacking the information about cross component flow, so lets add the events being triggered and listened to: With all this information in our map, we can navigate it. Do you consider using Archimate as a graphic notation for your application map? This is very valuable because it tells us, or any non technical person, what each component can do. Crucially important here is that these diagrams be automatically generated directly from the code, otherwise the diagram will reflect only what we think the code looks like, and if that was accurate we wouldn’t really have much need this type documentation. Architecture must be documented in a good amount of detail and should be presented in … The Class dependency diagram is useful to analyse the dependencies between the different types of class we have in our codebase, specially if they are in the same layer. For this level, we use an UML diagram with class level artefacts. I’ll quickly explain the main idea in my own words, although using his own example diagrams. http://www.idesign.net/Training/Architect-Master-Class. Level 2: Container diagram 3. series of posts about Software Architecture, https://java-design-patterns.com/patterns/strategy, Architectural Blueprints—The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xe5erulKsdaha3uwU6tNWsAWxjQK-Rcrr_iJeOCXuSQ/edit?usp=sharing, Joel Parker Henderson github repository about ADRs, https://github.com/hgraca/explicit-architecture-php, Java Annotated Monthly – September 2019 | IntelliJ IDEA Blog, Documenting Software Architecture – Trần Ngọc Minh Notes, Documenting Software Architecture — @herbertograca – ianwattsblog, Documenting Software Architecture – Notes de Francis, Dew Drop – August 23, 2019 (#3016) | Morning Dew, http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/2015/03/08/package_by_component_and_architecturally_aligned_testing.html, https://github.com/ebbypeter/Archimate-PlantUML, http://www.idesign.net/Training/Architect-Master-Class, Documenting Software Architecture – Ameer Academy, Lean Architecture by James Coplien and Gertrud Bjornvig, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler, Patterns Principles and Practices of Domain-Driven Design by Scott Millett and Nick Tune, The mythical man-month by Frederick P. Brooks, DDD, Hexagonal, Onion, Clean, CQRS, … How I put it all together, Microservices architecture: What the gurus say about it, Teams: building, managing, leading, performing, DDD Europe 2017: The 3 talks I most enjoyed, Dare to be Good Enough—You'll be Happier for it. Architecture documentation (also known as software architecture description) is a special type of design document. Although they are pretty good for the other diagrams. First published: April 15, 2008. Within this category of diagram, I find it useful to have 3 different types of diagram, to assert about different dependency types. ( Log Out /  This way of visualising a software application architecture is based on 5 views/perspectives of the application, telling us what diagrams can be used to document each of those views. We will also list the event subscribers in each component, for exactly the same reasons as we list the listeners. Deleting a user will trigger an event that will delete the users’ posts; Creating a post will trigger the event that will lead to both subscribing the author to the posts’ subjects and increasing the authors rating; Deleting a post, from whatever use case, triggers an event that will result in decreasing that authors’ rating. Next, in each component, we list any relevant services. IBM and Red Hat — the next chapter of open innovation. The fact that the ADR is written before hand, doesn’t mean that it is immutable, it must be updated/improved as the discussion unfolds. Now in my POC i am using regexes, so as long as that is possible…. Since this report is a snapshot of current work, the material described here may change before the handbook is published. To know more about each of these types, you can check each of the links above that lead to some Visual Paradigm guides, or check out this blog post. Level 1: System Context diagram 2. The handbook, tentatively entitled Documenting Software Architectures, will be published in early 2002 by Addison Wesley Longman as part of the SEI Series on Software Engineering. That’s why i mention that we would need some way to analyze only the use case we need. The use of a consistent, color-coded taxonomy is also a very helpful take-away from Juval’s course. I don’t think Application Map would work well in a functional paradigm, where the focus is on the data that is being transformed, not components exchanging events or dependencies. This content is no longer being updated or maintained. So, the tool used to generate these diagrams should also be usable as a testing tool and included in our CI pipeline, just like unit tests are, preventing unwanted dependencies to reach production, which maintains and enforces modularity, which in turn helps reach high changeability rate and therefore high velocity of feature development. Software architecture has become a widely accepted conceptual basis for the development of nontrivial software in all application areas and by organizations of all sizes. Documenting software architectures: views and beyond Abstract: This lecture maps the concepts and templates explored in this tutorial with well-known architectural prescriptions, including the 4+1 approach of the Rational Unified Process, the Siemens Four Views approach, and the ANSI/IEEE-1471-2000 recommended best practice for documenting architectures for software-intensive systems.