Software Fortresses: Modeling Enterprise Architectures

15.3. Ten Rules for Software Fortress Design

Of course, software fortresses work well only if your overall design is sound. What are the most important design rules for a software fortress architecture? Here are my top ten:

1. At the enterprise level, focus on treaties. Use treaty–ally–responsibility (TAR) cards to get an overview of which fortresses play which parts in which treaties. Pay close attention to the sequence–ally diagrams (SADs), which are very helpful for gaining an understanding of how fortresses will work together and for identifying performance problems.

2. Define fortresses with the right amount of granularity. If you have thousands of fortresses, you have most likely confused fortresses with components, or even worse, with objects. ...