Communicating Software Architecture
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Using technical diagrams to take your project from presentation to production
In this course, you’ll:
- Learn how to present pitch-perfect visuals to stakeholders
- Understand the appropriate degree of detail to include in your visuals to suit your audience
- Examine design and accessibility patterns and antipatterns in visual communication
Course description
This training is what your software architect toolkit has been missing and will teach you how to successfully communicate and design your architecture while gaining the approval of your stakeholders. You will learn how to create diagrams and visuals that effectively communicate with technical and business audiences through reusable patterns and practical exercises.
Learn how to choose material that is appropriate for your audience so that you may successfully communicate with your product owner and budget holder just as well as your developers and testers. Understand how to use the right amount of detail so your audience doesn’t get lost or miss the point entirely, and how to choose a standard or notation that will work best for your message and the audience. Discover how accessibility isn’t all about screen-readers being able to access website content, and the hidden disabilities and impairments you should be catering to.
You’ve made your architecture decisions, you’ve analyzed your trade-offs, you’ve applied architecture patterns; now it’s time to convey your design so that your project goes from paper and presentation into production.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- That diagrams and other visual communication must be tailored to your audience
- The importance of accessibility and standards in visual communication
- What type of diagram to use and how much detail to include
And you’ll be able to:
- Create diagrams and visuals that have the appropriate degree of technical and business data for your audience
- Choose the most relevant standards and diagram types for your needs
- Use patterns in your visual message to make it more accessible to all audiences
This live event is for you because...
- You’re an architect, developer, or analyst who uses diagrams to communicate.
- You collaborate with corporate and technical stakeholders that require an understanding of your design.
- You want to strengthen your visual communication in order to gain more support from your stakeholders.
Prerequisites
- Some experience with creating diagrams (useful but not required)
Recommended follow-up:
- Take Mastering Technical Presentations by Example (live online training course with Neal Ford)
- Read Presentation Patterns: Techniques for Crafting Better Presentations (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Introduction (10m)
- Presentation: Introduction
- Intro to course: goals, where to ask questions, when I will answer, etc
- Introduce tools: Draw.io, repository on GitHub for links and exercises
Communication Essentials (20m)
- Presentation: Face in the Crowd
- Multi-Storey Diagram
- Connect the Dots
- Q&A
Clarify the Clutter (60m inc. exercise & break)
- Presentation: Explosion of Unicorns
- Spider’s Web
- Notes on a Theme
- Exercise: Apply Explosion of Unicorns, Spider’s Web and Notes on a Theme to a given diagram
- Q&A / discuss exercise
Accessibility (60m inc. exercise and break)
- Discussion: Which disabilities/impediments/disadvantages do we need to cater for?
- Presentation: Color is Key
- Exercise: Determine which object in an image is a specific color, when the image is simulating a type of color blindness
- Presentation: Written in Legend
- MLAH (Multiple-Letter Acronym Hell)
- Discussion: what do these acronyms mean?
- Presentation: Pure & Simple
- Exercise: Apply Written in Legend, MLAH, and Pure & Simple to create a diagram from a written description
- Q&A / discuss exercise
Narrative (20m)
- Presentation: A push in the right direction
- Show them the Pirate Ship
- Discussion: When is a good time to use animation?
- Q&A
Notation (20m)
- Discussion: Name some conventions/notations
- Presentation: Not-so-unified modelling language
- Feedback: do you use UML or not in your work?
- Presentation: Structures Behaving Badly
- Unconventional
- Q&A
Composition (40m inc exercise and break)
- Presentation: Meta Style
- Discussion: which style is correct?
- Presentation: Strike a Balance
- Exercise: Create a Context view of Jedi’s overview diagram
- Extension: start creating container views from same diagram
- Q&A
Summary (10m)
- Final Q&A
Your Instructor
Jacqui Read
Jacqui Read is an internationally-recognised solution and enterprise architect, and author of Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects. She teaches public and private workshops and speaks at international conferences on topics such as architecture practices, technical communication, and systems design. Jacqui specializes in untangling and extracting value from data and knowledge, helping businesses to determine direction in complex environments. Her professional interests include collaborative modeling, knowledge management, Domain-Driven Design, sociotechnical architecture, and modernizing enterprise architecture practices. Outside of work she enjoys gardening and strumming her ukulele while singing at the same time. Her website is https://jacquiread.com/.