The Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture

Author: James McGovern, Scott W. Ambler, Michael E. Stevens, James Linn, Elias K. Jo List Price: $39.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0131412752 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (15 November, 2003) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 4,588 Average Customer Rating: 4.67 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Enterprise Architecture is not going to make you into a developer (and why would you want to be one, in the first place? For the pizza and sugar-filled drinks?) but the book provides a congent explanation of the tasks that should go behind the development of enterprise-wide systems. This is of particular value if your work requires that you interact with architects and technical leads - you can gain a solid understanding of their concerns, the technical pressures with which they live, and their goals.

Of course, there's the caveat: the book describes ideal development, or at least what its authors believe to be ideal development of large-scale systems. Too many of my experiences have been in businesses that would have profited from their CTOs having read Enterprise Architecture - perhaps if more do, there will be fewer late nights!

I give this book 5 stars as a review, and as a value to the manager. Were I in the trenches, I might reconsider - the work concentrates on breadth, not depth. To the authors' credit, of course, they make that fairly clear from the start, and there are guidelines as to where to search for more. Who knows how long they'll last, or how long this book will remain current, but for now, it's the best book I've found on the subject, and instead of using it to prop up a shaky table, I have it as reference when I'm speaking to engineers by phone!

The book provides well written, practical, accessible overviews of a number of topics important to enterprise architecture, including infrastructure architecture, software architecture, service oriented architecture, data architecture, product line architecture and architecture for the presentation tier, as well as a set of extensions to RUP (known as "EUP" - see http://www.enterpriseunifiedprocess.info) and sets of practices to help make architecture and modelling "agile".

There's a lot here of value and the book is one that's easy to recommend to those interested in developing into the role of enterprise architect.

The limitations of the book are probably inevitable, given its fundamental form (covering a wide range of topics and being written by six authors) but it does have some.

Each of the subjects covered is described in a single chapter, leading to a relatively shallow degree of explanation and you're often left with a lot of questions - particularly how to apply this knowledge. Having said this, the text provides plenty of suggestions for further reading to address this problem.

The wide range of subjects also leads to a certain degree of fragmentation, and the book could do with a stronger introduction to provide a "roadmap" to its content and to explain why these are the critical subjects to cover.

Finally, there is also a certain amount of variation in style and depth between the different subjects, a problem that is probably inevitable where six authors and ten subjects are involved. An example of this is where software product lines are really just introduced (with little guidance as to their application - which is actually quite tricky), while in contrast, the sections on agile modelling and SOA contain a lot of useful advice to guide their use.

These relatively minor gripes aside though, this is certainly a book to have on your bookshelf, if you are involved in the development of enterprise system architectures.

I'd also echo a previous reviewer's comment that the book is well produced, albeit with a few missing references.

This group of distinguished software architects have compiled an omnibus of enterprise architecture standards and practices to try and put some order into this chaotic situation. McGovern et al define what they call "agile architecture".

Traditional forms of architecture have been overly complex, expensive and inextensible. Agile methods hope to cure that problem by using minimalist forms of the standard tools described in the book. The authors warn that their primary audience is composed of experienced software developers and architects, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the book to newer entrants to the field. This makes a very good overview of modern IT architectural practices.

Various chapters contain thumbnail sketches of such techniques as: SOA, web services, UML, SEI/CMM, the Zachman Framework, MDA, and RUP. Most importantly, they examine the benefits and drawbacks of these techniques and how they can be modified to fit the "agile architecture" model.

On a minor note, the book is beautifully produced on high-quality paper, using a clear font and just enough diagrams to add meaning to the text. Considering how much information has been packed into one book, the clear layout really helps to make it usable both for reading from beginning to end, and also for referring to later.

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