Head First Software Architecture

Chapter 12. Do It Yourself: Testing Your Knowledge

Ready to test your skills in creating a distributed architecture? In this chapter, you’re the software architect. You’ll be determining architectural characteristics, building a logical architecture, making architectural decisions, and deciding whether to use microservices or event-driven architecture. The exercises in this chapter will give you an end-to-end view of what a software architect does and show you how much you’ve learned. Get ready to create an architecture for a student standardized test–taking system called Make the Grade. Good luck—we hope you get an A on your architecture!

Welcome to Make the Grade

Congratulations—you’ve just been hired by Dataville Public Schools to build a new system for standardized testing. All students in a specific grade level will take the same test to determine how well students, teachers, and the schools are doing.

Make the Grade requirements document

• □ Students will take a web-based test in their homeroom, proctored by their homeroom teacher. Because tests are timed (2 hours), the system must present questions as fast as possible.

• □ Each student is presented with a multiple-choice question on the screen. Once they answer it, the system captures the answer and delivers the next question. Students may skip questions, but may not go back to prior ones—only moving forward is allowed. ...