#Java program architecture diagram software#
#Java program architecture diagram professional#

#Java program architecture diagram software#

I’ve seen a number of debates over the years about whether software development is an art, a craft or an engineering discipline. This book focusses on the visual communication and documentation of software architecture. Designing software is where the complexity should be, not communicating it. Over 10,000 people and 30+ countries later, I have gigabytes of anecdotal photo evidence - the majority of the diagrams use an ad hoc “boxes and lines” notation with no clear notation or semantics. I’ve been running software architecture training courses for a number of years, part of which is a simple architecture kata where groups of people are asked to design a software solution and draw some architecture diagrams to describe it. In fact, I was often the only person on the team who really understood UML well enough to create diagrams with it.įast forward to the present day, and creating software architecture diagrams seems to be something of a lost art. I remember seeing a number of software development teams reducing the quantity of diagrams and documentation they were creating. The way teams built software started to change, with things like diagramming and documentation being thrown away alongside big design up front. I also like sketching out solutions to problems, again because it’s a great way to get everything out into the open in a way that other people can understand quickly.īut then something happened somewhere during the early 2000s, probably as a result of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development that had been published a few years beforehand. Visualising the problem is a way for me to ask questions and figure out whether I’ve understood what you’re saying. Talk to me about a business problem and I’m likely to draw a high-level domain model. Describe a business process to me and I’ll sketch up a summary of it. I like being able to visualise a problem before trying to find a solution. With buggy user interfaces and ugly diagrams, the tooling may not have been brilliant back then, but it was still very useful if used in a pragmatic way. A number of the projects I worked on made extensive use of tools like SELECT and Rational Rose for diagramming and documenting the design of software systems.

#Java program architecture diagram professional#

I remember attending a training course about the Unified Modeling Language and the SELECT tooling soon after I started my professional career. I graduated from university in 1996, a time when CASE and modeling tools were popular and in common use.