Blog & Articles by Dr. Gernot Starke

Article

Fundamentals of software architecture: Part 4

Who does it?

Article

Fundamentals of software architecture: Part 3

Tasks and activities – How is it done?

Article

Fundamentals of software architecture: Part 1

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.

Article

Fundamentals of software architecture: Part 2

Terms

Blog Post

Concise Documentation – Revisited

The Architecture Communication Canvas

Article

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).

Article

Shortcomings of ISO 25010
Article

Pixie und der Sumpf

Bare-Metal Provisioning, Schritt für Schritt

Article

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.

Article

1×1 guter Architekturdiagramme

Von schlechter zu besser mit 11 praktischen Tipps

Blog Post

Documenting software architecture with arc42

A brief introduction

Blog Post

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. ​ ​

Article

Eine kleine Geschichte über Qualität…

…die entfernt auch mit Software zu tun hat

Article

Principles of technical documentation
Blog Post

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.

Blog Post

Authoring Markdown with Zotero - My Workflow

Combining simple writing with powerful references

Blog Post

Setup für Hybrid-Workshops

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

Article

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.

Blog Post

What’s in a name: Legacy
Blog Post

The (new) Software Architecture Foundation curriculum
Blog Post

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.

Blog Post

iSAQB Advanced Level examination anti-patterns

These simple mistakes will drive your examiners crazy

Blog Post

What’s in a Name: Quality
Article

The art of software reviews

Auch in erfolgreichen Softwaresystemen lauern praktisch immer Probleme. Durch systematische Reviews können Sie diese Probleme zielgerichtet identifizieren – und damit eine robuste Grundlage für zukünftige Verbesserungen schaffen. Der Artikel stellt die Breitensuche als den zentralen Ansatz methodischer Software-Reviews vor und beleuchtet einige der wesentlichen Untersuchungsansätze.

Article

Die VENOM Story

Strategische Anwendungsmodernisierung mit Split+Extract Strategien