arc42 by Example: Software architecture documentation in practice

Document the architecture of your software easily with this highly practical, open-source template.

Key Features

• Get to grips with leveraging the features of arc42 to create insightful documents
• Learn the concepts of software architecture documentation through real-world examples
• Discover techniques to create compact, helpful, and easy-to-read documentation

Book Description

When developers document the architecture of their systems, they often invent their own specific ways of articulating structures, designs, concepts, and decisions. What they need is a template that enables simple and efficient software architecture documentation. arc42 by Example shows how it's done through several real-world examples.

Each example in the book, whether it is a chess engine, a huge CRM system, or a cool web system, starts with a brief description of the problem domain and the quality requirements. Then, you'll discover the system context with all the external interfaces. You'll dive into an overview of the solution strategy to implement the building blocks and runtime scenarios. The later chapters also explain various cross-cutting concerns and how they affect other aspects of a program.

What you will learn

• Utilize arc42 to document a system's physical infrastructure
• Learn how to identify a system's scope and boundaries
• Break a system down into building blocks and illustrate the relationships between them
• Discover how to describe the runtime behavior of a system
• Know how to document design decisions and their reasons
• Explore the risks and technical debt of your system

Who this book is for

This book is for software developers and solutions architects who are looking for an easy, open-source tool to document their systems. It is a useful reference for those who are already using arc42. If you are new to arc42, this book is a great learning resource. For those of you who want to write better technical documentation will benefit from the general concepts covered in this book.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. HTML Sanity Checking
3. Mass Market Customer Relationship Management
4. biking2
5. DokChess
6. docToolChain
7. macOS Menu Bar Application

Dr. Gernot Starke is an INNOQ Fellow and is the co-founder and a longstanding user of the arc42 documentation template. For more than 20 years, he has been working as a software architect, coach, and consultant, conquering the challenges of creating effective software architectures for clients from various industries. Dr. Gernot co-founded the International Software Architecture Qualification Board (iSAQB e.V.) and the open-source Architecture Improvement Method. Dr. Gernot has authored several (German) books on software architecture and related topics.

Michael Simons works as a senior software engineer for Neo4j. Previously, he worked at Enerko Informatik, an Aachen-based company dealing with GIS systems. He has a background focused on geographic information systems for utilities and price calculation for the energy market. In his brief time at INNOQ, he helped customers modernize their application systems. Michael is known for having a certain passion for SQL and Spring. He took his apprenticeship at the FZ Jülich and studied at FH Aachen, Campus Jülich. He is a PRINCE2 ® registered practitioner and sometimes gets torn between the roles of an architect and project manager. Michael is a dedicated blogger and is engaged in various open-source projects. He is also a father of two, husband, geek, and passionate cyclist.

Stefan Zörner has 20 years of experience in IT and always looks to the future with excitement. He supports clients in solving architecture and implementation problems. In interesting workshops, he demonstrates how to use practical design tools, as well as spreading enthusiasm for real-life architectural work.

Ralf D. Müller is a solutions architect and an ambitious Grails developer. He is continually trying to simplify his work. Currently, his main concern is improving the holistic documentation of projects. He achieves this especially with the help of the arc42 template and docs-as-code approach. He is the founder of the docToolchain project.