The Art of Visualising Software Architecture with Simon Brown

About the Presentation

Drawing on his book of the same name, Simon Brown explores the visual communication of software architecture based on his experience of working with software development teams across the globe.

If you ask a software developer to communicate the software architecture of a software system using diagrams, you’ll likely get a confused mess of boxes and lines. We could use the Unified Modeling Language (UML), but this is often irrelevant because many teams have already thrown out UML in favour of much simpler “boxes and lines” diagrams. Perhaps, in the race for agility, many software development teams have lost the ability to communicate visually.

In this talk, we will look at what is commonplace today, the importance of creating a shared vocabulary, diagram notation, and the value of creating a model – plus how to use tooling and static analysis to automate diagram generation.

About Simon Brown

Simon Brown is an independent software development consultant specialising in technical leadership, communication, and lightweight, pragmatic approaches to software architecture. He is the author of two books about software architecture; Software Architecture for Developers (https://leanpub.com/software-architecture-for-developers) (a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, technical leadership, and the balance with agility) and The Art of Visualising Software Architecture (https://leanpub.com/visualising-software-architecture) (a guide to communicating software architecture with sketches, diagrams and models). Simon is also the creator of the C4 software architecture model (https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2014/10/simple-sketches-for-diagramming-your-software-architecture/) for which he built Structurizr (https://structurizr.com/), a web-based tool to create software architecture diagrams based upon the C4 model.

Simon regularly speaks at software development conferences, meetups, and organisations around the world delivering keynotes, presentations, and workshops about software architecture. In 2013, he won the IEEE Software sponsored SATURN 2013 "Architecture in Practice" Presentation Award for his presentation about the conflict between agile and architecture.