This lecture, recorded at the University of Colorado Boulder in September 2012, leads the audience through an exercise of building an alarm clock. The audience consisted of 70 seniors majoring in computer science. It is based on material taken from the book Just Enough Software Architecture. The point of the exercise is to focus attention not on the features of the alarm clock -- all alarm clocks have reasonably equivalent features for our purposes -- but instead on the *qualities* and the ways the clocks can fail. Why would you choose a battery-based clock over one that plugs into the wall? Well, LED clocks are easy to read at night but generally start blinking 12:00 every time the power goes out. So there is a tradeoff between readability and reliability. But of course the battery can fail too... The class structures its choices according to the "rational architecture choice" template, which looks like this: Since X is a priority, we chose design Y, accepting downside Z. This exercise was recorded directly after the lecture Introduction to Software Architecture, which you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x30DcBfCJRI Slides: http://rhinoresearch.com/files/alarm-clock.pdf Book hardback: http://www.amazon.com/Just-Enough-Software-Architecture-Risk-Driven/dp/0984618104 e-Book: http://rhinoresearch.com/content/buy-e-book I hope you enjoy it.

Comments

1. Thanks George.. thats well explained..
2. Good exercise. George touched many important aspects of Software Architecture like Quality Attributes, Trade Off Analysis in a simpler manner... Good for beginners...
3. Please send me updated link for the files.
   Thanks in advance
4. I want you as my teacher!!!
5. Very simple approach to think through quality attributes in software architecture. This example clearly places the concepts of Risk points, sensitivity and tradeoff points of ATAM