Blog & Articles by Dr. Gernot Starke

Business Model Canvas: Geschäftsmodelle sichtbar machen

Der Business Model Canvas hilft, zentrale Fragen frühzeitig zu klären: Wer sind unsere Kund:innen? Welches Problem lösen wir? Und wie erzeugen wir damit echten Mehrwert? Gerade an der Schnittstelle zwischen IT und Business schafft das Modell ein gemeinsames Verständnis – und hilft, technische Entscheidungen mit der Geschäftsperspektive zu verbinden.

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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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Canvas 101

One-Pager für bessere Kommunikation

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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?

In this (fourth) installment of the mini-series on software architecture, we explain who might carry out the architecture tasks that were discussed in the previous articles. I also present a number of possible role definitions for software architecture along with their pros and cons.

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Tasks and activities – How is it done?

Fundamentals of software architecture – Part 3

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Terms

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

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Building, purpose, aesthetics

Welcome to the first part in the mini-series on software architecture. We start by examining the original source of the term – since the word architecture presumably conjures in most people thoughts of buildings.

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Concise Documentation – Revisited

The Architecture Communication Canvas

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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

Published in 2011, the ISO 25010 standard on software product quality lacks pragmatism and practical applicability. Terms like scalability, deployability, energy efficiency, safety, or code quality are missing. This article explains these shortcomings and shows that even the (draft) update from 2022 still needs polishing…

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Pixie und der Sumpf

Bare-Metal Provisioning, Schritt für Schritt

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Sparsame Dokumentation

Ich weiß – Dokumentation ist nicht Ihr Lieblingsthema. Deswegen bekommen Sie hier ein paar Tipps für schmerzfreie Dokumentation. Die hier vorgestellten Ideen sparen Ihnen wertvolle Zeit, sowohl bei Erstellung als auch Pflege der Dokumentation. Sie funktionieren für jede Art von Softwaresystem, unabhängig von Werkzeugen, Technologien und Entwicklungsansätzen.

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1×1 guter Architekturdiagramme

Sie wollen oder müssen Architektur dokumentieren und möchten dafür grafische Darstellungen verwenden? Sie wünschen sich verständliche Diagramme, die auch zukünftig noch leicht änderbar sind? Sie möchten, dass Ihre Diagramme für unterschiedliche Zielgruppen nützlich sind? Und wenn Sie ganz ehrlich sind, wollen Sie dieses Doku-Zeugs in möglichst kurzer Zeit erledigen, damit Sie sich wieder anderen Dingen zuwenden können.

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Documenting software architecture with arc42

A brief introduction

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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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Eine kleine Geschichte über Qualität…

Du denkst Dir nichts Böses, da bittet Dich Tante Lucy um einen kleinen Gefallen… und Du musst Dich entscheiden, wie Du das angehen sollst. Aber als Belohnung winkt ihr leckerer Erdbeerkuchen, außerdem sind wir doch alle Herausforderungen gewöhnt, oder?

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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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Setup für Hybrid-Workshops

So verbindet ihr „vor-Ort“ und „online“

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Quality Driven Software Architecture - Revised

Quality is the raison d’être for software architects: Our systems should be reliable, performant, scalable and user-friendly. Systems should be build and maintained cost-effective and future-proof. Every IT professional knows that this combination of characteristics means hard work. The article shows how you can methodically construct quality.

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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

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Migrating the iSAQB® Mock Examination to AsciiDoc

The iSAQB(R) provides a mock-examination for the Foundation-Level certification. This post shows how we moved this exam from docx format to AsciiDoc, facilitating collaboration and enabling automated generation of the required multilingual document variants.