Communication Patterns

Having a great idea or design is not enough to make your software project succeed. If you want stakeholders to buy into your design and teams to collaborate and contribute to the vision, you also need to communicate effectively. In this practical book, author Jacqui Read shows you how to successfully present your architecture and get stakeholders to jump on board.

Misunderstanding and lack of buy-in leads to increasing costs, unmet requirements, and an architecture that is not what you intended. Through constructive examples and patterns, this book shows you how to create documentation and diagrams that actually get the message across to the different audiences you’ll face.

This book shows you how to:

• Design diagrams and documentation appropriate to your expected audience, intended message, and project stage
• Create documentation and diagrams that are accessible to those with varying roles, needs, or disabilities
• Master written, verbal, and nonverbal communication to succeed in technical settings
• Apply the communication patterns presented in this book in real-world projects and software designs
• Communicate and collaborate with distributed teams to successfully design and document software and technical projects

Table of Contents

Part I. Visual Communication

Chapter 1. Communication Essentials

Chapter 2. Clarify the Clutter

Chapter 3. Accessibility

Chapter 4. Narrative

Chapter 5. Notation

Chapter 6. Composition

Part II. Multimodal Communication

Chapter 7. Written Communication

Chapter 8. Verbal and Nonverbal Communication

Chapter 9. The Rhetoric Triangle

Part Ill. Communicating Knowledge

Chapter 10. Knowledge Management Principles

Chapter 11. Knowledge and People

Chapter 12. Effective Practices

Part IV. Communicating Remotely

Chapter 13. Remote Time

Chapter 14. Remote Principles

Chapter 15. Remote Channels

About the Author

Jacqui Read is an internationally-recognised solution and enterprise architect, with hands-on experience and expertise architecting and coding software systems. She specialises in assisting businesses to create and enhance architecture practices, construct evolutionary architectures, and untangle and extract value from data and knowledge.

Alongside consulting, Jacqui teaches public and private workshops and speaks at international conferences on topics such as architecture practices, technical communication, and architecture decisions. Her professional interests include collaborative modelling, knowledge management, Domain Driven Design, sociotechnical architecture, and modernising enterprise architecture practices. Outside of work she enjoys gardening and attempting to strum her ukulele and sing at the same time.