Effective communication is critical to an architect’s success. Diagramming and presenting are two critical soft skills for the software architect.
The practice of always showing the relationship between parts or an architecture, either in diagrams or presentations, before changing views. This is important when describing an architecture, where you must often show different views of the architecture.
Diagram Example with Representational Consistency
The topology of architecture is always of interest to architects and developers because if captures how the structure fits together.
Proportional relationship between a person’s irrational attachment to some artifact and how long it took to produce. That means one will be more attached to a four-hour diagram than a two-hour one. Using low-tech tools lets teams throw away what’s not right.
Many tools exist, the following requirements are well advised to be productive and efficient in creating diagrams.
When modelling, build your own style when creating diagrams and feel free to borrow from representations that are particularly effective.
We will cover here a few interesting points, but the Presentation Patterns book goes very deep here to list various patterns and anti-patterns.
The difference between a document and a presentation is time, the presenter controls how quickly unfolds, instead of the the reader (which is the case with a document). Therefore, as a presenter you must learn how to manipulate time.
Presentation tools offer 2 ways to manipulate time on slides: transitions and animations. Transitions move from slide to slide, animations allow for movement within a slide. These are used to hide the boundaries between slides. Using subtle combinations of transitions and animations such as dissolve allows presenters to hide individual slide boundaries, stitching together a set of slides to tell a single story. TO indicate the end of a thought, presenters should use a distinctly different transition (like a door or cube) to provide a visual clue tha they are move to a different topic.
A common anti-pattern of presentations is where every slide has essentially the speaker’s notes, projected for all to see. Most readers who read ahead of the speaker and then switch to listening, just waiting for the speaker to finish reading off the slide. Also this overloads the slide, which can be overload the attention of the audience.
The speaker has 2 information channels: verbal and visual. The solution to this problem is to use incremental builds for slides, building up (hopefully graphical) information as needed rather than all at once.
You can use the same image but only show a part of it, and hide the rest of the image with a borderless white box. The presenter can then expose a portion at a time.
Presenters make the mistake of adding too much material to slides when they can make important points more powerfully. Remember, presenters have 2 information channels (slides and speaker), use it strategically for adding more punch.
A simple pattern where the presenter inserts a blank black slide within a presentation to refocus attention solely on the speaker. If someone has 2 information channels (slides and speaker) and turns one of them off (the slides), it automatically will focus attention back on the speaker because they are now the only interesting thing in the room to look at.
