The Art of Visualising Software Architecture

as you may have seen on twitter , i've been mulling over an idea for a new book, which i'm pleased to say is going to happen. it's currently titled "the art of visualising software architecture" and, as the title suggests, it will focus on the visual communication of software architecture through diagrams.

the core of the book is my c4 software architecture model and although this is covered in my existing software architecture for developers book, i want to create a single resource related to this topic because i still see effective communication of software architecture as a huge gap across the software development industry. you'll notice that the title of this book includes the word "art". i've seen a number of debates over the years about whether software development is a craft or an engineering discipline. although i think it should be an engineering discipline, i believe we're a number of years away from this being a reality. so while this book won't present a formalised, standardised method to communicate software architecture, it will provide a collection of ideas and techniques that thousands of people across the world have found useful.

i also want to include a number of other topics and answers to frequently asked questions that i get during my software architecture sketching workshops, including some of the blog posts i've written recently such as help, my diagram doesn't fit on one page! and diff'ing software architecture diagrams again , for example. i'm also going to include more discussion about notation, the various uses for diagrams, the value of creating a model and tooling. structurizr will be in there too.

thanks very much for all of the support so far on this; the tweets/e-mails i've had are telling me that this is the right decision. since it's not going to be a long book and initial drafts may include some text copied verbatim from my "software architecture for developers book", i'm going to make this available via leanpub using their variable pricing model ... with a starting price of free, certainly for a while anyway. it's a work in progress, but please feel free to grab a copy from leanpub if you're interested. thanks very much!