Systems Architecting

Systems Architecting : Creating and Building Complex Systems by EberhardtRechtin? Prentice-Hall, 1991

ISBN 0-13-880345-5 When he wrote this book, Eberhardt Rechtin was writing patterns for system architecting without realizing it. Written as Alexander's 1979 thesis TheTimelessWayOfBuilding became widely known, Rechtin's book contains over 100 heuristics for good system architecting practices. When taken in the context of Alexander's patterns and abstracted to the process of architecting large systems, these heuristics constitute nothing less than the beginning of a systems architecting process pattern library.

The book is organized into three sections. "Part One - Architecting Complex Systems" addresses systems architecting processes, tools and techniques. Part Two discusses challenges facing architects of large complex systems, including ultraquality, biological architectures and intelligent behavior, and economics and public policy. Part Three explores architecting and management with discussions of organizations and architectures, the profile of the systems architect, assessing architecting and architectures, and future considerations.

By itself, Systems Architecting provides an easily read introduction to an emerging discipline. With the heuristics as the basis for a systems architecting process pattern library, I commend it to anyone interested in systems architecting as an art, as well as a science.

-- ThomasErickson (mailto:tom.erickson@lmco.com)

P.S. The book may be difficult to find - Amazon.com lists it as a special order. If you have difficulty locating it, I can recommend a second book Rechtin has written with Mark W. Maier on the subject, entitled The Art of Systems Architecting. (Published by CRC Press, 1996, ISBN 0849378362 .)

SystemsArchitecting is an excellent book and should be read by more software people (Rechtin comes out of the DoD systems engineering tradition, and is better known in those circles). Rechtin has the good sense to include Xerox PARC and Smalltalk in a list of remarkable architects and products that also includes Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed SR-71, Fred Brooks and the IBM 360 operating system, and Robert Gilruth and the Apollo lunar vehicles.

I too was impressed that Rechtin was already hip to ChristopherAlexander at the time when SystemsArchitecting was being written (1990). But I disagree that Rechtin was writing patterns without realizing it. The heuristics Rechtin identifies in SystemsArchitecting are amazingly incisive, and of immense value - but their context of applicability is so broad that they fail the "specific context" PatternityTest. Rather, the heuristics he identifies can and should be used as forces in patterns; I have used them this way, with attribution, in some patterns I have written.--RandyStafford