Software Architecture Quotes

The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.

Almost everything we know about good software architecture has to do with making software easy to change

I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.

Cloud first software architecture is critical to designing efficient systems. All the hardware need to be capable of the most sophisticated things and then we can focus our attention on improving software capabilities.

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

Dijkstra once said, “Testing shows the presence, not the absence, of bugs.” In other words, a program can be proven incorrect by a test, but it cannot be proven correct. All that tests can do, after sufficient testing effort, is allow us to deem a program to be correct enough for our purposes.

Science does not work by proving statements true, but rather by proving statements false.

All race conditions, deadlock conditions, and concurrent update problems are due to mutable variables.

If change is the only constant in the universe, then software change is not only constant but ubiquitous.

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made

Just as the Hare was overconfident in its speed, so the developers are overconfident in their ability to remain productive.

This is the monstrosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite, and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit. —William Shakespeare

The first value of software—behavior—is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software—architecture—is important but never particularly urgent.

The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system.

Architecture must be carefully distinguished from implementation. As Blaauw has said, "Where architecture tells what happens, implementation tells how it is made to happen.

The main lesson here is that not every problem can be solved at the level of abstraction where it manifests.

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. —Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

The problem that Dijkstra recognized, early on, was that programming is hard, and that programmers don’t do it very well.

The Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) tells us that the most flexible systems are those in which source code dependencies refer only to abstractions, not to concretions.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit. —Aristotle

When a child has learned this architecture, he can tell time as easily from a wristwatch as from a church tower.

Just by making the architect role explicit, a team can effectively resolve many technical conflicts.

Architecting for the enterprise, when all you really need is a cute little desktop tool, is a recipe for failure.

An architecture that is not documented, and not communicated, may still be a good architecture, but the risks surrounding it are enormous. —RK

Conway’s law: Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure. The second of these is the greater of the two because it is this value that makes software soft.

The way you keep software soft is to leave as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. What are the options that we need to leave open? They are the details that don’t matter.

Consider thinking of architectural decisions as investments and take into account the associated rate of return, it is a useful approach for finding out how pragmatic or fit for purpose every option on the table is.

In 1966, Derrida delivered a paper entitled “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (which is a wonderful paper, right up there with the original DynamoDB paper and the Page Rank algorithm paper).

The primary cost of maintenance is in spelunking and risk. Spelunking is the cost of digging through the existing software, trying to determine the best place and the best strategy to add a new feature or to repair a defect.

Where technology acquisition was once the province of the CIO, today it’s the practitioner leading that process, because by the time a CIO typically hears about a project today, a majority of the technology and architectural decisions have already been made.

Good software systems begin with clean code. On the one hand, if the bricks aren’t well made, the architecture of the building doesn’t matter much. On the other hand, you can make a substantial mess with well-made bricks. This is where the SOLID principles come in.

1. “First make it work.” You are out of business if it doesn’t work. 2. “Then make it right.” Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. “Then make it fast.” Refactor the code for “needed” performance.

Twenty minutes later, Three Body’s Von Neumann architecture human-formation computer had begun full operations under the Qin 1.0 operating system. “Run solar orbit computation software ‘Three Body 1.0’!” Newton screamed at the top of his lungs. “Start the master computing module! Load the differential calculus module! Load the finite element analysis module! Load the spectral method module! Enter initial condition parameters … and begin calculation!” The motherboard sparkled as the display formation flashed with indicators in every color. The human-formation computer began the long computation.

Connascence, in the context of software engineering, refers to the degree of coupling between software components. (Connascence.io hosts a handy reference to the various types of connascence.) Software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other(s) to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system.

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level—consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system, language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program—for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling—may likewise be described in only a few pages of equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific details than the actual physics and chemicalrelations controlling the neurotransmitters, ion channels, and other synaptic and dendritic variables involved in the neural processes. Although all of this complexity needs to be carefully considered before advancing to the next higher conceptual level, much of it can be simplified as the operating principles of the brain are revealed.

The label “jack-of-all-trades but master of none” is normally meant to be derogatory, implying that the labelee lacks the focus to really dive into a subject and master it. But, when your online shopping application is on the fritz and you’re losing orders by the hundreds as each hour passes, it’s the jack-of-all-trades who not only knows how the application’s code works but can also do low-level UNIX debugging of your web server processes, analyze your RDBMS’s configuration for potential performance bottlenecks, and check your network’s router configuration for hard-to-find problems. And, more important, after finding the problem, the jack-of-all-trades can quickly make architecture and design decisions, implement code fixes, and deploy a new fixed system to production. In this scenario, the manufacturing scenario seems quaint at best and critically flawed at worst.

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

The architecture of a software system is the shape given to that system by those who build it. The form of that shape is in the division of that system into components, the arrangement of those components, and the ways in which those components communicate with each other. The purpose of that shape is to facilitate the development, deployment, operation, and maintenance of the software system contained within it. The strategy behind that facilitation is to leave as many options open as possible, for as long as possible

We wrote our software to know the detailed structure of the disk. It knew that the disk had 200 cylinders and 10 heads, and that each cylinder had several dozen sectors per head. It knew which cylinders held the Agents, Employers, and Members. All this was hard-wired into the code. ... One day a more experienced programmer joined our ranks. When he saw what we had done, the blood drained from his face, and he stared aghast at us, as if we were aliens of some kind. Then he gently advised us to change our addressing scheme to use relative addresses.

Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa was motivated by more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical component, one that was related to his penchant for control. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies.

The physical structure of the Internet presents a suggestive story about the concentration of power - it contains "backbones" and "hubs" - but power on the Internet is not spatial but informational; power inheres in protocol. The techno-libertarian utopianism associated with the Internet, in the gee-whiz articulations of the Wired crowd, is grounded in an assumption that the novelty of governance by computer protocols precludes control by corporation or state. But those entities merely needed to understand the residence of power in protocol and to craft political and technical strategies to exert it. In 2006, U.S. telecommunications providers sought to impose differential pricing on the provision of Internet services. The coalition of diverse political interests that formed in opposition - to preserve "Net Neutrality" - demonstrated a widespread awareness that control over the Net's architecture is control of its politics.

By the architecture of a system, I mean the complete and detailed specification of the user interface. For a computer this is the programming manual. For a compiler it is the language manual. For a control program it is the manuals for the language or languages used to invoke its functions. For the entire system it is the union of the manuals the user must consult to do his entire job. The architect of a system, like the architect of a building, is the user's agent. It is his job to bring professional and technical knowledge to bear in the unalloyed interest of the user, as opposed to the interests of the salesman, the fabricator, etc.[2] Architecture must be carefully distinguished from implementation. As Blaauw has said, "Where architecture tells what happens, implementation tells how it is made to happen."[3] He gives as a simple example a clock, whose architecture consists of the face, the hands, and the winding knob. When a child has learned this architecture, he can tell time as easily from a wristwatch as from a church tower. The implementation, however, and its realization, describe what goes on inside the case—powering by any of many mechanisms and accuracy control by any of many.

2006 interview by Jim Gray, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recalled another watershed moment: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there’s no data sharing among the services.3 That’s a lot to unpack for non–software engineers, but the basic idea is this: If multiple teams have direct access to a shared block of software code or some part of a database, they slow each other down. Whether they’re allowed to change the way the code works, change how the data are organized, or merely build something that uses the shared code or data, everybody is at risk if anybody makes a change. Managing that risk requires a lot of time spent in coordination. The solution is to encapsulate, that is, assign ownership of a given block of code or part of a database to one team. Anyone else who wants something from that walled-off area must make a well-documented service request via an API.

The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist. Any learning algorithm contains, in one way or another, a set of assumptions about the domain to be learned. Rather than trying to learn everything from scratch, it is much more effective to rely on prior assumptions that clearly delineate the basic laws of the domain that must be explored, and integrate these laws into the very architecture of the system. The more innate assumptions there are, the faster learning is (provided, of course, that these assumptions are correct!). This is universally true. It would be wrong, for example, to think that the AlphaGo Zero software, which trained itself in Go by playing against itself, started from nothing: its initial representation included, among other things, knowledge of the topography and symmetries of the game, which divided the search space by a factor of eight. Our brain too is molded with assumptions of all kinds. Shortly, we will see that, at birth, babies' brains are already organized and knowledgeable. They know, implicitly, that the world is made of things that move only when pushed, without ever interpenetrating each other (solid objects)—and also that it contains much stranger entities that speak and move by themselves (people). No need to learn these laws: since they are true everywhere humans live, our genome hardwires them into the brain, thus constraining and speeding up learning. Babies do not have to learn everything about the world: their brains are full of innate constraints, and only the specific parameters that vary unpredictably (such as face shape, eye color, tone of voice, and individual tastes of the people around them) remain to be acquired.

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

What is WordPress? WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress. WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. You can download and install a software script called WordPress from wordpress.org. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a servicecalled WordPress.com. WordPress users may install and switch between different themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. Every WordPress website requires at least one theme to be present and every theme should be designed using WordPress standards with structured PHP, valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Themes: WordPress is definitely the world’s most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it’s been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like. WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install. It’s good choice for beginners. Plugins: WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. WordPress has over 40,501 plugins available. Each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. WordPress menu management has extended functionalities that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc. If you like this post then please share and like this post. To learn more About website design in wordpress You can visit @ tririd.com Call us @ 8980010210

A software architecture is defined by a configuration of architectural elements--components, connectors, and data--constrained in their relationships in order to achieve a desired set of architectural properties.

No foreign architect of stature, such as I. M. Pei, resides in Japan. Foreign architects come to Japan on short-term contracts, erect a skyscraper or a museum, and then leave. But subtle and sophisticated approaches to services and design—the core elements of modern building technology—cannot be transmitted in this way. Japan is left with the empty shells of architectural ideas, the hardware without the software.

fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1

A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse

We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse

with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural

Software architecture is the set of design decisions which, if made incorrectly, may cause your project to be cancelled.

when you go after the perfect architecture. The difference between the right architecture and the perfect architecture is the difference between finishing a project, and being fired for never finishing the project. You need to seek an architecture that meets the purpose of the project.

May the software you write today have an architecture that your children’s children may discern and celebrate.

The software architecture of a computing system is the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprise software elements, relations among them, and properties of both.

software architecture is a set of architectural (or, if you will, design) elements that have a particular form.

s s i o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications

o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1

The most important driver of user satisfaction is usefulness, which is largely reflected in the interaction design. The interaction design has to be incorporated at the deepest level of the software architecture and it is often the most expensive to change late in the process.

What is software architecture? The answer is multitiered. At the highest level, there are the architecture patterns that define the overall shape and structure of software applications 1 . Down a level is the architecture that is specifically related to the purpose of the software application. Yet another level down resides the architecture of the modules and their interconnections. This is the domain of design patterns 2 , packakges, components, and classes

The judgement of a software developer, particularly the experienced full-stack developer, ranges over the gamut of technical, architectural, and user experience concerns. We do not expect someone else to make our creations easy to use and attractive after we are done. Nor do we abdicate responsibility for the final product to a design we receive like a set of stone tablets. If we detect problems or can suggest improvements, we say something.

History is the collective consciousness of the then intellectuals and not just some numbers, time and events.

Software vendors are building new applications specifically for these new architectures. Third parties are creating tools to monitor and manage these applications and infrastructure areas. As cloud computing begins to become the de facto model for development, deployment, and maintaining application services, this area will expand even further.

Ultimately, therefore, the focus of design around these functions and instruments of digital computation represents a shift in the role and nature of the designer: “the tool user (designer) becomes the new toolmaker (software engineer).

When watching people use gadgets and software, we need to remember that the way they’re making use of their context is largely being determined by the structures available to them. Often, I have heard e-commerce clients complain that their customers are using the online shopping cart improperly, as a sort of wish-list, even when the site provides a separate wish-list function. Though when you look at the environment neutrally as a cluster of environmental structures, it becomes clear that Add to Cart is usually a much easier and quicker function to find and use than Add to Wish-List — the button tends to be more prominent, more available, and the “Cart” itself is always represented somewhere (normally as a concrete metaphor with a picture of a cart) regardless of where the user is shopping. Why wouldn’t the user make use of such an available, straightforward environmental structure over a less-available abstraction?

If the application is event-driven, it can be decoupled into multiple self-contained components. This helps us become more scalable, because we can always add new components or remove old ones without stopping or breaking the system. If errors and failures are passed to the right component, which can handle them as notifications, the application can become more fault-tolerant or resilient. So if we build our system to be event-driven, we can more easily achieve scalability and failure tolerance, and a scalable, decoupled, and error-proof application is fast and responsive to users.

One of the most important roles for management is ensuring architectural integrity and sustainability when developing code. One

As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.

12.2 The Basis for the CBAM

A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

We know software isn’t physical. But because perception depends upon invariant structure, we see it and use it whenever it seems to be offered to us, even if a software code release can upset those invariants in a moment’s time. These differences and disruptions are not the sorts of behaviors we evolved to perceive with any accuracy. They are instead the black ice, or quicksand, of digital objects and places.

5 Thumb Rules to Follow for Outsourcing 3D Character. Outsourcing has become one of the basic requirements of the digital industry. Be it software, websites, architecture rendering or 3D character modelling, companies look forward to outsource these tasks to reliable names. Reason is simple. When it comes to value for money, 3D Art Outsourcing Service stands to be the most viable option as setting up in-house production often isn’t considered a wise ROI choice. But, this necessity has also given rise to possible frauds. There are countless companies waiting to gulp your money in the blink of an eye. There are many more who are ready to lure you with lucrative offers when it comes to 3D character modelling concept. Since not everyone is familiar with the technicalities of this field, companies can easily get trapped with fake promises of giving top notch services well within their reach, only to find out that the whole thing was neither worth their time nor money. However, all the sham can be avoided if companies follow the six thumb rules while Game outsourcing character modelling tasks to animation studios as these will lead them to the right names. 1) Take a Tour of the Website Although you will find expert comments on not to judge a company by its cover, there is no denying the fact that website plays a decisive role in company’s credibility, especially when it comes to art and animation studios. A studio that claims to offer you state-of-art results must first focus on its own. A clean, crisp website with appropriate content can actually say a lot about the studio’s work. A poor design and inappropriate content often indicate the following things: - Outdated and poorly maintained - Negligence towards its virtual presentation - Unprofessionalism - Poor marketing A sincere design and animation studio will indeed feature a vibrant website with all its details properly included. 2) Location Matters Location has a huge impact on hiring charges as it largely decides the price range one can expect. If you are looking forward to countries like India, you expect the range to be well within your budget chiefly because such countries have immense talent, but because of the increasing demand and competition in the field of outsourcing, hiring charges are relatively cheaper than countries like UK or USA. This means that once can get desired expertise without spending a fortune. 3) Know Your Team Inside Out Since you will be spending your hard earned money, you have every right to know the ins and outs of your team. Getting to know the team can assist you in your decision. Do your part of homework and be ready with your queries. Starting from their names to their works, check everything you can, and if need be, go for one-to-one conversation. This will not only help you to know them better, but will also give you an idea of their communication, their knowledge about their work and their sincerity. A dedicated one will always answer you up to the point while a confused one with fidget with words or beat around the bush. 4) Don’t Miss Out on the Portfolio While the website of a studio is its virtual representative, it’s the portfolio which speaks about its execution. Reputed names of 3D modelling and design companies house excellent projects ranging from simple to complex ones. A solid portfolio indicates: - commitment of the studio towards its projects - competency of its team - execution and precision - status of its expertise Apart from the portfolio, some animation studios even feature case studies and white papers in their websites which indicate their level of transparency. Make sure to go through all of them.

Domain concern Architecture characteristics Mergers and acquisitions Interoperability, scalability, adaptability, extensibility Time to market Agility, testability, deployability User satisfaction Performance, availability, fault tolerance, testability, deployability, agility, security Competitive advantage Agility, testability, deployability, scalability, availability, fault tolerance Time and budget Simplicity, feasibility

The Ponzi scheme is a specific and easily identifiably structure that isn’t applicable to Bitcoin but could be to some phony cryptoassets. While a truly innovative cryptoasset and its associated architecture requires a heroic coding effort from talented developers, because the software is open source, it can be downloaded and duplicated. From there, a new cryptoasset can be issued wrapped in slick marketing.

A common anti-pattern in architecture entails trying to design a generic architecture, one that supports all the architecture characteristics.

Apple’s P-type loonshots, of course, transformed their industries: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. But what ultimately made them so successful, aside from excellence in design and marketing (most, although not all, of the technologies inside had been invented by others), was an underlying S-type loonshot. It was a strategy that had been rejected by nearly all others in the industry: a closed ecosystem. Many companies had tried, and failed, to impose a closed ecosystem on customers. IBM built a personal computer with a proprietary operating system called OS/2. Both the computer and the operating system disappeared. Analysts, observers, and industry experts concluded that a closed ecosystem could never work: customers wanted choice. Apple, while Jobs was exiled to NeXT, followed the advice of the analysts and experts. It opened its system, licensing out Macintosh software and architecture. Clones proliferated, just like Windows-based PCs. When Jobs returned to Apple, he insisted that the board agree to shut down the clones. It cost Apple over $100 million to cancel existing contracts at a time when it was desperately fighting bankruptcy. But that S-type loonshot, closing the ecosystem, drove the phenomenal rise of Apple’s products. The sex appeal of the new products lured customers in; the fence made it difficult to leave.

cohesion and coupling are concerns regarding modular software, and what is microservice architecture other than modules that communicate via networks and can be independently deployed

If you create software that is packaged and shipped to customers who then operate it themselves, microservices may well be a bad choice... The reality is that you cannot expect your customers to have the skills or platforms available to manage microservice architectures. Even if they do, they may not have the same skills or platform that you require.

software architecture, you have extensibility,” says Rene. “Maybe it is hard to see, but this plant is also architected for extensibility along its main production lines.

The goal is for your architecture to support the ability of teams to get their work done—from design through to deployment—without requiring high-bandwidth communication between teams.

Performance Tactics on the Road Tactics are generic design principles. To exercise this point, think about the design of the systems of roads and highways where you live. Traffic engineers employ a bunch of design “tricks” to optimize the performance of these complex systems, where performance has a number of measures, such as throughput (how many cars per hour get from the suburbs to the football stadium), average-case latency (how long it takes, on average, to get from your house to downtown), and worst-case latency (how long does it take an emergency vehicle to get you to the hospital). What are these tricks? None other than our good old buddies, tactics. Let’s consider some examples: • Manage event rate. Lights on highway entrance ramps let cars onto the highway only at set intervals, and cars must wait (queue) on the ramp for their turn. • Prioritize events. Ambulances and police, with their lights and sirens going, have higher priority than ordinary citizens; some highways have high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, giving priority to vehicles with two or more occupants. • Maintain multiple copies. Add traffic lanes to existing roads, or build parallel routes. In addition, there are some tricks that users of the system can employ: • Increase resources. Buy a Ferrari, for example. All other things being equal, the fastest car with a competent driver on an open road will get you to your destination more quickly. • Increase efficiency. Find a new route that is quicker and/or shorter than your current route. • Reduce computational overhead. You can drive closer to the car in front of you, or you can load more people into the same vehicle (that is, carpooling). What is the point of this discussion? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: performance is performance is performance. Engineers have been analyzing and optimizing systems for centuries, trying to improve their performance, and they have been employing the same design strategies to do so. So you should feel some comfort in knowing that when you try to improve the performance of your computer-based system, you are applying tactics that have been thoroughly “road tested.” —RK

In the end, all vendor products and application architectures are constrained by the same fundamental principles of distributed computing and underlying physics: applications, and the products they use, run as processes on computers of limited capacity, communicating with one another via protocol stacks and links of nonzero latency. Therefore people need to appreciate that application architecture is the primary determinant of application performance and scalability.

Just because architecture is supposed to be stable, it does not mean that it should never change.

As Fernando Cornago, Senior Director of Platform Engineering, and Markus Rautert, Vice President of Platform Engineering and Architecture, explained their IT department went from being seen as a cost center, with a single vendor providing most of the software (requiring frequent hand-offs) and only a few in-house engineers (doing more managing than engineering), to a product-oriented team organization. Adidas invested 80% of its engineering resources to creating in-house software delivery capabilities via cross-functional

Conway’s law tells us that we need to understand what software architecture is needed before we organize our teams, otherwise the communication paths and incentives in the organization will end up dictating the software architecture. As Michael Nygard says: “Team assignments are the first draft of the architecture.”7

If we accept that the self-similar force (between architecture and team organization) described by Conway is real, then we also need to accept that anyone who makes decisions about the shape and placement of engineering teams is strongly influencing the software systems architecture. There is a logical implication of Conway’s law here, in the words of Ruth Malan: “if we have managers deciding . . . which services will be built, by which teams, we implicitly have managers deciding on the system architecture.”11

How much awareness does the HR department have about software systems? Does the group of department leaders deciding how to allocate budget across teams know of the likely effects of their choices on the viability of the software architecture? Given that there is increasing evidence for the homomorphism behind Conway’s law, it is very ineffective (perhaps irresponsible) for organizations that build software systems to decide on the shape, responsibilities, and boundaries of teams without input from technical leaders. Organization design and software design are, in practice, two sides of the same coin, and both need to be undertaken by the same informed group of people. Allan Kelly’s view of a software architect’s role expands further on this idea: More than ever I believe that someone who claims to be an Architect needs both technical and social skills, they need to understand people and work within the social framework. They also need a remit that is broader than

Discussions around architecture often focus on tools and technologies. Should the organization adopt microservices or serverless architectures? Should they use Kubernetes or Mesos? Which CI server, language, or framework should they standardize on? Our research shows that these are wrong questions to focus on. What tools or technologies you use is irrelevant if the people who must use them hate using them, or if they don’t achieve the outcomes and enable the behaviors we care about. What is important is enabling teams to make changes to their products or services without depending on other teams or systems. Architects should collaborate closely with their users—the engineers who build and operate the systems through which the organization achieves its mission—to help them achieve better outcomes and provide them the tools and technologies that will enable these outcomes.

Each service is meant to represent a domain or subdomain; in many ways, microservices is the physical embodiment of the logical concepts in domain-driven design.

Orchestration-Driven Service-Oriented Architecture Architecture styles, like art movements, must be understood in the context of the era in which they evolved, and this architecture exemplifies this rule more than any other. The combination of external forces that often influence architecture decisions, combined with a logical but ultimately disastrous organizational philosophy, doomed this architecture to irrelevance. However, it provides a great example of how a particular organizational idea can make logical sense yet hinder most important parts of the development process.

A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle.

The computer scientist Gerald Weinberg is famous for saying, “No matter what the problem is, it’s a people problem.

The software architecture of a system is the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprise software elements, relations among them, and properties of both.

By its very nature every architecture is a statement about what we expect to remain constant and what we admit may vary.

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. —Henry Ford

Given our skills, constraints, cultural and engineering maturity, desired software architecture, and business goals, which team topology will help us deliver results faster and safer?

By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.

how we organize our teams has a powerful effect on the software we produce, as well as our resulting architectural and production outcomes. In