Case Study Organization

We realize that different readers of the book will want to mine different information from it, and that most of them will want to read the book at various levels of detail. To address this need, we have organized the case studies in a consistent fashion around the following sections:

• A brief description of the study, the problems it was solving, and the points about software architecture it illustrates

• A description of how the ABC was realized (or partially realized) in this study

• The requirements and qualities that propelled the design

• The architectural solution: a detailed discussion that comprises the bulk of many of the case studies

• A summary of the important points made in the chapter

The architectural solution contains most of the detail in the case studies. If you are interested only in the technical and business environment and a high-level description of the architectural approach, you can get the gist of a case study by reading the brief description of it, its requirements and quality goals, and the summary. For a fuller discussion, you can also read the architectural solution section of each case.