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Book: Software Architecture

  • Authors: A. Bijlsma, B.J. Heeren, E.E. Roubtsova, S. Stuurman
  • Licenses:Creative Commons Attribute ShareAlike License
  • Information: 162 Pages; 2.3Mb
Software architecture is the discipline concerned with model-based description and analysis of software systems with a view to satisfying the (often contradictory) concerns of stakeholders. The software architecture of a system is a high-level description of its components and their interactions.

The central theme of this course book is balancing the concerns and requirements of stakeholders, combining these into an architecture proposal by employing known tactics and patterns, producing a description of the architecture that can be communicated and analysed, and evaluating the resulting architecture's qualities.

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Book cover

Evolution of this book

This course book has been contributed by the Open University Netherlands (OUNL). The first edition of this book was written by Sylvia Stuurman and Ella Roubtsova in 2007 as an OUNL course book based on lectures given by Lex Bijlsma in the Software Technology master programme of Utrecht University. These lectures in turn owed much to an earlier version by Gert Florijn. A second edition, with contributions from Bastiaan Heeren, was published in 2009. The FTA version was updated and rewritten by Sylvia Stuurman in 2011.