Simon @ CodingTheArchitcture recently asked "How big is your software architecture document? (and who reads this stuff anyway?)"
He notes that in a UG meeting most of the attendees has SADs that were more than 50 pages long.
It would probably not be too surprising if I say than in my opinion the answer is that it depends. Reflecting back on some of my past projects I had SADs that varied in range from a 200+ "write-only"* document to a less than 10 pages lean document. And the sizes match the intended usage of the documents. for instance in the two extremes mentioned. The first case it was a huge mission critical project with a specific requirement from the customer to have an "official" SAD and it was written to satisfy some project milestone (PDR) . Where the second extreme is an agile project where the architecture document was a working document, written some 10 iterations into the development to highlight some of the emergent guidelines.

What is common to all the SADs I wrote (or was responsible to) is that they all tried to grasp the essence of the design, all used multiple viewpoints to describe the solution, all were focused on quality attributes and all explained the rationale behind the decisions.
  • If you drone endlessly with details you don't see the forest from the trees.
  • if you don't use multiple views - you are likely to miss important aspects of the solution
  • if you aren't focused on quality attributes that you are most likely documenting design and not architecture
  • and if you don't explain the rationale then the document doesn't have a lot of added value beyond the code itself
in any event, the important thing here is that when it comes to Software Architecture Documents "size doesn't matter" :). What matters is that the SAD satisfies the reason it was written for


*While this particular SAD was rather long it also had a section that helped potential readers find relevant chapters so that it can actually be usable, and not just as a"door stopper"

 
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