Book Recommendation - The Art of Systems Architecting, by Eberhardt Rechtin

[David Hetherington]

It was great to attend my first SIG meeting today. Actually,  Lean Coffee... an interesting experience, sort of a mini Product Camp Austin.

At any rate there were a lot of comments about different books, so I thought I would mention this one which is held in very high regard in the Systems Engineering community.

(By the way, that would not be "people who take care of servers in that data center" . That would be rather the INCOSE <International Council on Systems Engineering> people, the folks who architect complex hardware/software systems like railroad networks, aircraft carriers, commercial airliners, and so on)

At any rate, Rechtin is a professor at USC and is extremely well regarded in the complex systems community. He explores four approaches to architecture:

• Normative (solution-based) Examples: building codes and communications standards
• Rational (method-based) Examples: systems analysis and engineering
• Participative (stakeholder-based) Examples: concurrent engineering and brainstorming
• Heuristic (lessons learned) Examples: Simplify. Simplify. Simplify

The book then explains the problems and pitfalls of each approach. USC did a lot of work on heuristics (rules of thumb) and these are covered in considerable detail as well.

I have attached a quick iPhone excerpt of the first page that sets the tone for the book.

If you are building a really simple system, architecture is a breeze...!

David Hetherington