Next Up

Architecture descriptions can be great. It’s up to you to design them for awesomeness. Think about what your audience needs to know and organize views of the architecture to help people see the whole picture. Describe the elements, their responsibilities, and why you chose them for this architecture. Take advantage of the breadth of description methods. Stuffy, big documents are not the only way to explain design decisions. The most important thing is to communicate effectively and explain your vision for the architecture to the world.

Creating an architecture description also creates our first opportunity to test the system’s design, even before we’ve written much code. The ability to test the architecture early is great news since, as you’ll see next, the earlier you can evaluate the architecture, the less pain you’ll have down the road.