Chapter 19. Show the Kids the Pirate Ship!
Why the Whole Is Much More Than the Parts
This is what people want to see
When you look at the cover of a box of LEGOs you don’t see a picture of each individual brick that’s inside. Instead, you see the picture of an exciting, fully assembled model, such as a pirate ship. To make it even more exciting, the model isn’t sitting on a living room table but is positioned in a life-like pirate’s bay with cliffs and sharks—Captain Jack Sparrow would be jealous.
What does this have to do with communicating system architecture and design? Sadly, not much, but it should! Technical communication too frequently does the opposite: it lists all the individual elements in painstaking detail but forgets to show the pirate ship. The results are tons of boxes (and hopefully some lines; see Chapter 23), without a clear gestalt or overall value proposition.
Is this a fair comparison, though? LEGO is selling toys to kids, whereas architects need to explain the complex interplay between components to management and other professionals. Furthermore, IT professionals have to explain issues like network outages due to flooded network segments, something much less fun than playing pirates. I’d posit that the analogy holds and we can learn quite a few things from the pirate ship for the presentation of IT architecture.
Grab Attention
The initial purpose of the ...
Get The Software Architect Elevator now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
