Blog by Dr. Gernot Starke

Technical and other Debt in IT Systems

This article explores the many hidden forms of technical debt that silently slow down IT teams—far beyond just messy code.

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Where does it go from here?

In this (fifth) installment of the mini-series on software architecture, we leave behind the realm of small to medium-sized systems and take a look at large, risky, and complex projects. In other words, we examine the “scaling” of the role of software architecture.

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Who does it?

Fundamentals of software architecture – Part 4

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Tasks and activities – How is it done?

In this part of the mini-series, we explain everything you need to do when creating software architecture. First, we take a look at the necessary tasks and activities. Then we discuss some of the skills and capabilities required for these architecture tasks.

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Terms

Welcome to the second part in the mini-series on software architecture.

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Building, purpose, aesthetics

Fundamentals of software architecture - Part 1

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Concise Documentation – Revisited

You think architecture documentation is cumbersome and takes a long time to create? We will prove you wrong.

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Babylon as a Feature

The Tower of Babylon is a myth meant to explain why the world’s peoples speak different languages. In modern IT systems, it’s often a requirement to support multiple languages. Such internationalization (i18n for short) is a tough challenge – and this post describes a simple solution to just the tiny part of multilingual documents. Our solution combines the simplicity of the plain-text format AsciiDoc with a simple yet versatile build script to support multiple languages (like EN and DE) and multiple output formats (like PDF and HTML).

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Shortcomings of ISO 25010

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Documenting software architecture with arc42

arc42 is a template for architecture communication and documentation. It is a proven, practical and highly pragmatic approach and takes the pain out of documentation.

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How I regained concentration and focus

For years, I enthusiastically produced content: books, articles, blog posts, and talks – averaging a book and a half plus five articles per year. Since about 2020, my productivity has plummeted – leaving me totally frustrated. There were no external causes, even the pandemic didn’t affect me, thanks to a nice home office and online work options — so no excuses. To find a way out of the misery, I put my own working habits to the test – and diagnosed a massive loss of concentration.

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Principles of technical documentation

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Awesome presentations deserve beautiful code

Occasionally we need to put parts of our source code onto slides for presentations. The common presentation programs (such as PowerPoint or Keynote) fail miserably at this task because they interpret code as normal text. Syntax highlighting is lost, as are indentations. It looks lousy, and it’s no fun. This post introduces carbon.now.sh, a quick and free solution, created by the awesome people from @carbon_app.

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Authoring Markdown with Zotero - My Workflow

This post describes an authoring workflow that combines the simplicity of markdown (for writing) with the power of a reference manager (for citing and generation of a bibliography).

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Quality Driven Software Architecture - Revised

Getting your product quality right

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What’s in a name: Legacy

The term “legacy” has a negative connotation in IT, and stands for an old, somehow bad piece of software. In real-life, legacy has a completely different and often positive meaning.

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What’s in a Name: Quality

We use the word quality colloquially for something “good” – but we usually leave open what exactly we mean by it. This article illustrates that we should be a little more precise in this regard.

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Migrating the iSAQB® Mock Examination to AsciiDoc

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The (new) Software Architecture Foundation curriculum

Want to learn Software Architecture? Look no further – the recently released iSAQB Foundation Curriculum covers all your needs!

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iSAQB Advanced Level examination anti-patterns

As the “crowning glory” of the iSAQB(R) Advanced Certification, you have to write an approximately 40-page-long paper (AKA architectural solution) to a given problem. During our 5+ years of experience in reviewing such papers, we found several anti-patterns. This blog post aims to help future CPSA-A aspirants to avoid these nasty glitches.

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What’s in a Name: Evaluate

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What’s in a Name: Architecture

The term architecture is used with slightly different meanings throughout the IT industry. This post clarifies what (software) architecture is all about - and which misunderstandings might linger on your way to common understanding.

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What’s in a Name: Transparency

The term transparent denotes something translucent, where light can shine through. It is, for example, used in context of economics (transparent markets), meaning markets where much is known by many, and nothing is hidden. Sometimes geeks tend to inverse this meaning, saying transparency where they mean opaqueness. This post illustrates that your favorite XY-framework by no means makes XY transparent for developers.

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What’s in a Name: Consistency

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What’s in a Name: Reactive

The term reactivity is overloaded with several different meanings. This post tries to identify and clarify a few of them…