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References: Architecture Principles and Governance

Curated sources for deeper study of architecture governance — principles, review boards, conformance, fitness functions, evolutionary architecture, and technology radars.

Books

  • Ford, Neal, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua. (2017). Building Evolutionary Architectures. O'Reilly Media. The source of the fitness function concept introduced in this chapter; provides the complete theoretical and practical framework for building architectures that can evolve while preserving structural integrity.

  • Bass, Len, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman. (2021). Software Architecture in Practice (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley. Covers architecture governance, conformance, and the architecture lifecycle that this chapter uses as its organizing framework; directly authoritative for the SEI perspective on governance.

  • Vernon, Vaughn. (2016). Domain-Driven Design Distilled. Addison-Wesley. Covers separation of concerns, bounded contexts, and modular decomposition — the structural properties that this chapter's governance mechanisms are designed to protect.

  • Rozanski, Nick, and Eóin Woods. (2011). Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley. Provides the viewpoint-based approach to architecture documentation referenced in this chapter, including the system context diagram as the scope-establishing artifact.

Articles and Papers

  • Parnas, David L. (1972). "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules." Communications of the ACM 15(12), 1053–1058. The foundational paper on separation of concerns and information hiding that underlies the governance mechanisms this chapter describes; every architecture principle is ultimately protecting one of Parnas's insights.

  • Kua, Patrick, Rebecca Parsons, and Neal Ford. (2016). "Fitness Functions as Architectural Guardrails." IEEE Software 33(6). Introduces and elaborates the fitness function concept that is central to this chapter's treatment of evolutionary architecture and automated conformance checking.

Online Resources

  • ThoughtWorks Technology Radar — ThoughtWorks. The original and most widely referenced technology radar, directly illustrating the governance tool this chapter introduces; updated biannually with current Adopt/Trial/Assess/Hold placements.

  • AWS Well-Architected Framework — Amazon Web Services. One of the reference architectures cited in this chapter; provides a concrete example of how a major cloud provider encodes architectural principles and governance expectations into a reusable framework.

  • ArchUnit User Guide — ArchUnit Project. Documentation for the Java structural conformance testing library referenced in this chapter as an example of automated architecture conformance checking.

  • Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) — adr.github.io. Collection of resources on Architecture Decision Records, the documentation mechanism that preserves governance decisions and principle rationale — essential for the governance lifecycle described in this chapter.

Videos

  • "Evolutionary Architecture." Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons. O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference. https://www.oreilly.com. Conference talk by the authors of Building Evolutionary Architectures introducing fitness functions and the evolutionary approach to governance; an accessible complement to the book chapter on this topic.