18. Documenting Software Architectures
If it is not written down, it does not exist.
—Philippe Kruchten
Even the best architecture, the most perfectly suited for the job, will be essentially useless if the people who need to use it do not know what it is; cannot understand it well enough to use, build, or modify it; or (worst of all) misunderstand it and apply it incorrectly. And all of the effort, analysis, hard work, and insightful design on the part of the architecture team will have been wasted. They might as well have gone on vacation for all the good their architecture will do.
Creating an architecture isn’t enough. It has to be communicated in a way to let its stakeholders use it properly to do their jobs. If you go to the trouble of ...
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