Defining software architecture

Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant, and self-described loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development. He works for software delivery company ThoughtWorks, where he has the exceedingly inappropriate title of chief scientist. Martin has written half a dozen books on software development, including Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. He writes regularly about software development on Martinfowler.com. Martin’s main interest is to understand how to design software systems to maximize the productivity of development teams, which includes both the patterns of good software design and the processes that support software design. He has become a big fan of Agile approaches and the resulting focus on evolutionary software design. Martin doesn’t come up with original ideas but does a pretty good job of recognizing and packaging the ideas of others—or, as Brian Foote puts it, he’s “an intellectual jackal with good taste in carrion.”

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Neal Ford is a director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy that thinks disruptively to deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. Neal focuses on designing and building large-scale enterprise applications. He’s an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially in the intersection of Agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored magazine articles, seven books (and counting), and dozens of video presentations and has spoken at hundreds of developers conferences worldwide on the topics of software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, and cutting-edge software innovations. Check out his website at Nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

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Brian Foster is a content director at O’Reilly Media, where he focuses on acquiring and shaping content in the areas of software architecture and development. He is also cochair of O’Reilly’s Software Architecture conference. Brian has been working in the book publishing and media industries for over 10 years and has a wealth of experience developing content for business, finance, financial engineering, statistical computing, and related markets. You can follow him on Twitter at @brianatoreilly.