Architecture templates

Architecture templates

• snehthakkar

  Many deep "Thank you" as all of the answers have been very helpful and with excellent linsk to great resources. Please lets stay in touch on this interest and important subject.
  
  

• Thorsten H

  One other important point. I am in a small shop where we don't have any architecture/modeling tools other than Visio and management whats architecture they can follow, not UML and they prefer graphical representations more than just text. So I have creating and looking for ideas for what I am calling a light weight documentation format for both text and graphical representation of the architecture of a software application.
  
  

• Meridian

  This is an interesting topic.  What are we talking about when we say "Architecture Template"   Is this just a set of patterns or guidance on disecting a domain and evolving a solution for that domain

  Tim

  
  
  

• rottengeek

  Unless detailed, formal, documentation is a specific requirement (which, unfortunately is the case in many of the project's I handle these days) you would want to keep the documentation "barely good enough".

  Arnon

  
  
  

• Nathan Tregillus

  Tim

  I have found the topic very interesting as well. In my case my work is mixed of being a lead and the unofficial architect and the duties take up so much time I do little programming. This rises a topic that should eb its own thread of how do architects stay up to-date on techonogly if their duties leave little time for actual coding.

  
  
  

• Joe Ingle

  You can also check the following site for more on Architecture Templates and Processes:

  http://www.bredemeyer.com/papers.htm

  
  

• Kenyon Cheung

  I am referring to templates for documenting software architecture which Arnon's site has referencs to. Also in my case I am in a small shop, fairly fast environment to get new or updated versions of products out so I am trying to come up with a light weight form of software architecture documentation.
  
  

• nglow

  Thank you Arnon this was very helpful and you have an excellent site.
  
  

• FHaak

  I understand your situation. As a consultant I work in teams of varying size. You always want just enough documentation. I guess I was just trying to expand the conversatioin since I found the subject line interesting.

  Tim

  
  
  

• Little Green Frog

  Hi Tim,

  It is rather hard to introduce any agility to fixed price, fixed date projects (we've had partial success on several projects). It is easier to introduce iterative (plan driven) processes (like RUP, MSF 4 etc.) - so you can try focusing your efforts on that - Data shows that Waterfallish (or rather Waterfoolish) development results are worse compared with the results of iterative methods.

  Arnon

  
  
  

• Anshuman Srivastava - MS

  There are a lot of frameworks that offers views for documenting architectures (RUP 4+1, Siemens 4 views, RM-ODP 5 views, Zachman 36 views etc.) -I wrote a blog post that talks about Choosing viewpoints (basically it depends on your stakeholder's needs)

  Regarding templates -

  There is one on HP's site:

  http://www.architecture.external.hp.com/Download/download.htm#ArchTemplate

  Another one can be found on my site http://www.rgoarchitects.com/saf/Templates/SAD.pdf - there are probably others on the internet

  By the way, if you need a UML 2.0 tool - I recommend you check out Enterprise Architect by Sparx Systems which is not very cost (and much more usable than Visio)

  Arnon

  
  
  

• torkel_b

  Arnon,

  I almost typed that very statement, but I didn't want to be accused of saying we should only do agile development. I would like to at least once see a real agile project before I jump off that bridge. It all sounds good, but I too work for many clients that talk about iterative processes but are really waterfall.

  Tim

  
  
  
• Architecture templates