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Picturing Architecture: UML (The Good Bits) and More

by Allen Holub

This course shows you how to visualize and communicate architecture using pictures, which is essential in an Agile environment. It takes you through the design process, covering everything from story cards to representing complex activity flows.

What you'll learn

You can't program effectively (or talk about your program effectively) without pictures, particularly in an Agile environment, where communication is central. This course, Picturing Architecture: UML (The Good Bits) and More, shows you how to communicate software concepts and structure using pictures or equivalent. You'll see how to represent stories and how to organize them effectively using index cards. You'll learn how to represent and organize stories and take them through the design process. You'll also learn how to represent complex activity flows, translate those flows into a messaging system, organize and represent the classes in your system, and represent the behavior of an object when that behavior changes with state. You'll learn about Story Cards, Story Maps, CRC-card walls (a system developed by the author), and a version of UML that's optimized for the whiteboard and adapted to modern Agile practice. By the end of this course, you'll be able to use pictures to communicate your program effectively within the Agile environment to others.

About the author

Allen is an internationally recognized trainer, agile-process consultant, speaker, and author. He specializes in Lean/Agile infusion and tuning, software architecture, and web-application programming using open-source toolsets. Allen's worn every hat from grunt programmer to CTO. He's built compilers, operating systems, massively scalable web applications, and mobile apps. He's written a dozen books and hundreds of magazine articles on practical programming topics, and currently blogs f... more

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