Software architecture needs to be documented. There are plenty of fancy templates, notations, and tools for this. But I’ve come to prefer PowerPoint with no backing template. I’m talking good old white-background slides. These are way easier to create than actual text documents. There are no messy worries over complete sentences. Freedom from grammatical tyranny! For a technical audience, concision and lack of boilerplate is a good thing. A nice mix of text, tables and diagrams gets the point across just fine. As a plus, this is naturally presentable — you don’t need a separate deck to describe your architecture when the deck is the reference document to begin with. As the architecture evolves, the slides evolve.
I’ve done a couple of architecture-level projects in the last two years, one of which got built and delivered as a SaaS platform that I’m discussing here. The first thing I captured were three- to five-year business goals. These were covered in an earlier post. The next section in the deck are the architectural principles.
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