Software Architecture for Product Families: Principles and Practice

Rating:
Summary: Good overview of embedded software architecture
Review: Generally good overview of software architecture options but not really what you want if you are interested in architecting highly complicated software-only systems. Their main focus, which is based on industrial experience, is embedded software in electronic devices such as televisions and mobile phones.

It is a shame that they did not really explain their Koala ADL. Still it contains a lot of good refernces and its a good starting point for more indepth study. Most references are to IEEE publications.

Rating:
Summary: Applying software architecture for product families
Review: The book covers a very broad scope of software architecture. Many different topics, like ADLs, architecture recovery and architecture assessment are covered. Neccessarily, the level of detail is somehow restricted. I don't consider this as an disadvanteage, because I think that „giving the big picture" is the main goal of the authors. Also, especially the case study chapters contain sufficient examples to give the practical oriented reader (like me) a good understanding of the topics.

The book tries to integrate the two areas of research and reference. Chapters 1 to 3 cover more the theoretical (research) part, while chapters 4 to 6 more the practical part. In that sense, chapters 1 to 3 serve as the reference part of the book, while chapters 4 to 6 show applications in real world systems. My impression was, that not all topics/items mentioned in the reference part of the book, are illustrated later in the practical part (for example, I could not find examples for „texture of software" which was mentioned in chapter 1). Also, chapters 4 to 6 contain some very useful and important techniques, which I missed in the reference part, for example discussion of using UML as ADL, DDT and also architecture simulation by use of CPN.

As I am more practicval oriented, I like more chapters 4 to 6 as they show me, how real world problems were solved. In these chapters some very good ideas were given, which are interstig for me. Also, I liked the introduction in chapter 1 because it first gives a good background coverage on software architecture and secondly because it names the reason for applying software architecture by giving some real world experiences (some of the problems mentioned here are familiar to me).

The book is written by a collection of writers. Of course, there are some variations in writing style through the chapters, but I consider this as acceptable, because of the great number of authors. All chapters are good to read.

I think, the book gives good information and practical examples on software architecture for product families. It should be useful for everybody working in that field.