Fundamentals of Software Architecture

Chapter 21. Diagramming and Presenting Architecture

Newly minted architects often comment on how surprised they are at how varied the job is outside of technical knowledge and experience, which enabled their move into the architect role to begin with. In particular, effective communication becomes critical to an architect’s success. No matter how brilliant an architect’s technical ideas, if they can’t convince managers to fund them and developers to build them, their brilliance will never manifest.

Diagramming and presenting architectures are two critical soft skills for architects. While entire books exist about each topic, we’ll hit some particular highlights for each.

These two topics appear together because they have a few similar characteristics: each forms an important visual representation of an architecture vision, presented using different media. However, representational consistency is a concept that ties both together.

When visually describing an architecture, the creator often must show different views of the architecture. For example, the architect will likely show an overview of the entire architecture topology, then drill into individual parts to delve into design details. However, if the architect shows a portion without indicating where it lies within the overall architecture, it confuses viewers. Representational consistency is the practice of always showing the relationship between parts of an architecture, either in diagrams or presentations, before changing ...