Topic 16 – Advanced Software Design

Why do I need to learn about advanced software design?
I think that I already learned about software design in the Topic 13 – Introduction to Software Design.

Now your task is not just to build a house.  Your task is to build a city. Now you will create very complicated software. You are responsible for creating a software system containing about 10,000 classes or functions for 5,000 people to use in 15 years. The maximum system downtime must be less than 5 minutes per year.

Image that you have to create a system that serves millions of users simultaneously like Facebook or YouTube or Amazon or Office 365 or GMail. Are you comfortable with building one.

Image that you are tasked to create a web framework for developers to extend such as ASP.NET or Yii or React. Are you confident in creating one?

If you are not sure how to fulfill these tasks then probably, you should learn how other people crafted similar systems and adapt their experiences to your case. Advanced software design introduces knowledge and tools to you so that you can begin to build your own complicated software.

What can I do after finishing learning advanced software design?

You will know how to design a complex software system that satisfies not only functional requirements but also security, modifiability, scalability, reusability, extensibility and reliability requirements.

That sounds interesting! What should I do now?

Advanced software design requires a lot of reading. Please do review the software design knowledge introduced to you in the Topic 13 – Introduction to Software Design first.

Nowadays software can be applied to many fields. Each of them requires specific advanced software design knowledge. In this topic, we only focus on enterprise software due to its popularity.

Before you design a complicated system you must thoroughly  understand its sophisticated requirements. This is a critical step when building a large system.

Please read this David C. Hay (2002). Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture. Prentice Hall PTR book to learn how to elicit, analyze and document requirements for an enterprise system.

After that please read this Philip A. Bernstein and Eric Newcomer (2009). Principles of Transaction Processing. Second Edition. Morgan Kaufmann book to learn about transactional processing principles and techniques.

After that please read
– this Eric Evans (2003). Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Addison Wesley book, and
– this Jimmy Nilsson (2006). Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET. Addison-Wesley Professional book, and
– this Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello (2014). Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise. Microsoft Press book, and
– this Vaughn Vernon (2013). Implementing Domain-Driven Design. Addison-Wesley Professional book to learn how to leverage domain-driven design approach to reduce system complexity.

After that please read
– this Mark Endrei et al. (2004). Patterns: Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services. IBM Corp book, and
– this Sam Newman (2021). Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems. O’Reilly book, and
– this Sam Newman (2019). Monolith to Microservices – Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith. O’Reilly Media book, and
– this Cloves Carneiro and Tim Schmelmer (2016). Microservices From Day One. Apress book to learn how to design microservices.

After that please read  this Martin Kleppmann (2016). Making Sense of Stream Processing. O’Reilly Media book to learn how to leverage event sourcing and stream processing to design software.

After that please read this Ian Gorton (2022). Foundations of Scalable Systems – Designing Distributed Architectures. O’Reilly Media book to learn how to design scalable software systems.

Terminology Review:

  • Enterprise Applications
  • Enterprise Systems
  • Transaction Processing
  • Domain-Driven Design
  • Factory
  • Repository
  • Microservices
  • Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CRQS)
  • Event Sourcing
  • Stream Processing
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Serverless

After finishing learning this topic please click Topic 17 – Calculus to continue.