How do you deliver software architecture?

Approaches, process and methodology

You've come up with an architecture, now what? There are a number of different ways that you can approach that particular problem using traditional, iterative or agile methodologies. Here is some content that covers this aspect of delivering a software architecture.

• Is your development process about to be eroded? - how do you approach software development in times of financial drought?
• Speculative design - how do you know when you've finished designing something?
• Phasing your software project - how do you slice up your project and which parts do you build first?
• Has Agile become a dirty word? - has agile had it's day?
• Common sense... - some useful advice for reviewing a project from a standing start.
• Reference Architectures - test your software architecture early and often.
• RUP elaboration - how do you choose the right use cases to build, test and reduce the risk?
• Give the user what they want... - the overall quality of your system should improve with the addition of functionality.

Testing and evaluating software architecture

Part of the architecture delivery process should include testing that architecture, ideally as early as possible if you have complex non-functional requirements. Here's some more content that talks about how to evaluate your software architecture.

• Code Metrics - automated tools can give you some really useful quality metrics on your code.
• How good is good enough? - if you are asked to review whether a system is good enough, how do you make that call?
• Performance tuning Java systems - tips for diagnosing and fixing performance problems with Java systems.
• Premature Optimisation - some advice for dealing with code level performance problems.
• Metrics Please! - more advice about optimising code and proving that the changes are worthwhile.
• What is Significant? - you make some changes, do they yield significant results?
• Testing Times - getting the right test coverage with the right type of tests is a balancing act.
• Who should own the non-functional tests? - shouldn't the team building the software be responsible for asserting it meets the non-functional requirements?
• A developer's guide to load testing - video - a presentation that introduces load testing and the process surrounding it.
• Stating the obvious - once you've tested your architecture, how do you present the results?
• Development with Complex Architectures - virtualisation can help you test complex architectures.

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We have more content about delivering software architecture in our How do you deliver software architecture? category.