How big is your software architecture document?
And who reads this stuff, anyway?
I'm going to write-up my notes from the last London user group (Sharing Architectures) later in the week, but I wanted to pose a question to you that I asked at the user group. How big is your software architecture document for your current project/system and what sort of information does it contain? Here's a graph summarising the size responses from the user group (small turnout this month).
As you can see, most people's software architecture documents are ~50 pages and above, which my experience suggests isn't uncommon. How does this compare to yours and does anybody read these documents?
About the author
Simon lives in Jersey (the largest of the Channel Islands) and works as an independent consultant, helping teams to build better software. His client list spans over 20 countries and includes organisations ranging from small technology startups through to global household names. Simon is an award-winning speaker and the author of Software Architecture for Developers - a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility. He still codes too. You can tweet Simon at @simonbrown.
Re: How big is your software architecture document?
In my previous project we had hundreds and hundreds of pages. Which was just as much of an issue. It was impossible to keep up to date and no one ever read it. Ah for the happy medium.
Re: How big is your software architecture document?
On a recent rash of waterfall projects the SADs were in the 80-150 page range. However, I suspect that each contained only 10-20 pages of insight.
These documents were read fairly thoroughly by the offshore team, though! Perhaps in the absence of someone to talk to about the architecture or requirements the documentation acts as a surrogate (albeit a substandard one IMHO).
Very few people onshore bothered to read the SAD - they relied on the information being presented to them instead. In terms of reviewing the architecture, the latter seemed to work best!