Book: Agile Enterprise Solution Architecture
“Agile Enterprise Solution Architecture” presents an IT service-based enterprise solution architecture that bridges the gap between traditional solution architecture and enterprise architecture in a holistic yet pragmatic modeling approach. It aims for ease of use and flexibility to better tackle the uncertainties within an IT system and reduce the cost of change.
This book is written by and for the practitioners without finicky definitions. Exemplified with a walkthrough case study, the modeling framework offered here helps externalize various stakeholders’ mental needs by correlating relevant architectural elements, placing functional services in the characterized containers (including cloud environment), and running through the optimal solutions. By leveraging the model’s architectural-thinking mechanism, IT architects can explore solutions from both structural and decisional schools of thought to grasp real problems and progressively reshape the systems for a larger, ever-changing context.
Book: Mastering Enterprise Solution Modeling
While the first book (Agile Enterprise Solution Architecture) presents an overall specification and an example walk-through case, this book goes a step further to explore the A-ESA model in terms of its six constituents: Method Specification (briefly summarized from the first book), Thinking Framework (the rationale behind the A-ESA model), Measurement Criteria (the key non-functional requirements and metrics and their relevance to an ESA), Architectural Styles (how A-ESA fits into each of the major ESA approaches), Governance Techniques (the soft and tough part of ESA that guides the quality work), and Tool (essential for pragmatic A-ESA modeling work).
The book has demonstrated eight simplified ESA cases that offer real-world context from various architectural styles, covering the governing ideas of the thinking framework and crucial topics such as key metrics and tradeoff considerations. The six constituents of the A-ESA model are instinctively integrated, as is the mapping between EA (enterprise architecture) and SA (solution architecture), between SA and SD (solution design), and between different architectural styles. Readers will see a unique IT solution model with critical elements in ESA based on the S3 principle: simplicity, significance, and systematics, and an architectural approach that effectively deals with today’s tough enterprise solutions.
The book provides a selected set of architectural thinking questions to ponder. It also presents a Lean Mode of the A-ESA model to suit certain agile solutions, and so on.
For like-minded architects and IT folks, your comments and reviews are welcome. The author can be reached at contact@a-esa.com. Thank you.