Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects

by Jacqui Read

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

Genres: Architecture, Technology, Communication, Computer Science, Software, Programming, Business

303 pages, Paperback

Published November 14, 2023

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, large and small, 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.

Reviews

[Gokce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers a range of topics from good diagramming remote working, good documentation and many more. It has a lot of tooling suggestions including open source so that’s very useful.

While reading often times I thought “this is really obvious”, for example don’t over use the colours or include a legend in your diagrams, but I’ve seen so many not so great diagrams that there’s definitely folk out there that would benefit from these advice.

An experienced person working in tech would probably be familiar with the most of the subjects but still a very worthwhile effort in my opinion to collect all these in one place, the book acts as a good reminder. Made me think and question my own working practices for example synch/asynch communication and how we can make it better.

[Avraam Mavridis · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s quite hard to rate the book, I would consider it a 5/5 and must read for junior / mid level engineers but I am not sure how much it offers to more seasoned engineers and I doubt it offers anything new to any architect in any serious company (since the things described are foundamentals)

[Sarah Dutkiewicz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is full of all sorts of treasures - from accessibility recommendations to tools recommendations and more!

This book covers both patterns and antipatterns seen in communications created by software architects. Communication includes visualizations as well as things like emails. Jacqui covers getting into written communication as well as verbal and nonverbal. This is critical, especially in a field where we don't necessarily remember the human part of consuming communication.

Something that we might overlook as we create communication pieces is the accessibility. This book includes great recommendations of tools that we can use to make our communications more accessible.

While the title focuses on developers and architects, I would also recommend this to data storytellers as well, because communication is important in sharing the stories that come from data.

[Dmitry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "Communication Patterns" by Jacqui Read is a well-written and insightful book that I highly recommend.

The book is a valuable resource for developers and software architects. While many suggested communication techniques are scattered throughout articles online, this book effectively compiles them into a cohesive and practical guide. I especially appreciated the book's expansion of the ADR (Architecture Decision Record) template by including a dedicated "Consultations" section. This fosters a more inclusive decision-making process by explicitly encouraging the capture of diverse opinions. Having spent years navigating technical documents, I can confidently say that the clear and concise communication patterns outlined in this book would significantly improve the clarity and effectiveness of countless technical artifacts.

[Jose Gabrielle Rivera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I initially thought it was a book about communication patterns among distributed systems. But no, it's about effective communication soft skills that are rarely taught (e.g. properly made diagrams, ADRs, emails, presentations, etc.). I'm happy to have read the book and it gives an excellent baseline to what effective and efficient communication can be in a dev team. I learned a lot of valuable insights and it gave me a lot of things to apply in my day-to-day work.

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some interesting topic’s around creating diagrams and technical writing.
Not sure that the author followed her own advice on maintaining level of abstraction by introducing ADRs, for some reason being popularised by Thoughtworks among general topics. Same about a lot of recommended tools.

[Eugene ghaiklor Obrezkov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personally, I didn’t get any insights from the book, but that’s mostly because I’ve already worked in distributed teams for some time and gave conferences talk.

However, I liked the way it structured. So if you are just jumping into IT world and want to know about patterns and anti patterns in communication - this book is for you.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides a collection of patterns and antipatterns on everything related to human communication in the context of working in IT. The author makes a good job of using software development analogies to explain certain ideas. Some of the patterns presented are a bit obvious, at least if you have some work experience.

[Lizardo Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

It helped me a lot, I work in a team that is very close to the old, and this book provides tools that I am confident in implementing them because I know it works.

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read and a good go-to place to have many essentials points about diagramming and generell visual communication in one place.

[Data Dius · Rating 4 out of 5]

For content and approach, I would give it a 3, but it had quite the impact with some ideas on my work, so it gets 4 stars for the impact.

[Jeroen · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5