Software Architecture Patterns, Antipatterns, and Pitfalls

Chapter 17. Stovepipe Architecture Antipattern

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In the old days, people kept warm and cooked using wood stoves. Because they required venting, people built stovepipes out of metal tubes, joints, and connectors to route smoke outdoors, often resulting in haphazard (and sometimes amusing) stovepipe configurations, like the one in Figure 17-1. Software architecture can sometimes resemble these ad-hoc, bolt-on stovepipes, resulting in what we call the Stovepipe Architecture antipattern. This chapter describes how to avoid this antipattern by applying effective techniques to iterate on an architecture.

Figure 17-1. An example of an ad-hoc and ill-fitting collection of stovepipe parts

Table 17-1 summarizes the metadata for the Stovepipe Architecture antipattern. Because this chapter deals with an antipattern, not a pattern, the “Improved” metadata category refers to the characteristics that are improved ...