System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems is a comprehensive text that brings new focus to the emerging discipline of systems architecture. Bridging engineering and management, this text contains a number of features to accelerate learning in the classroom and in the professional world.

Real world case studies and examples from leading system architects:
  • Case studies are included that apply system architecture to disciplines ranging from hybrid cars to commercial aircraft. Contributors include Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin,  Dr. Victor Tang, former special advisor to the CEO of IBM, and Dr. Willard Simmons, CTO of DataXu, the leading demand-side platform for online advertising.
  • This text builds from foundational examples, such as pumps, circuits, and sorting algorithms, to complex systems in networking and hybrid cars. These examples are built on the development experience of the authors in communications, transportation, mobile advertising, finance, robotics, and medical devices, ranging in complexity from farm equipment to the International Space Station.
A balance of descriptive, management-centered content and prescriptive methodologies for creating architecture:
  • Stepwise progression of architectural decisions, built cumulatively through five chapters
  • Summaries of chapter contributions presented in Methods Boxes.
  • Frameworks for upstream and downstream influences on architecture
  • A framework for conducting stakeholder analysis in early stages of architecting
Summary of the latest research on encoding architecture as decisions for enumeration and analysis:
  • Presentation of types of architectural problems and the analogous computer science problems
  • Sorting architectural decisions to identify the order in which decisions need to be made
  • Worked examples in the construction of models to support decision making for new architectures
  • Exposition of tradespace exploration as a tool for reasoning about potential architectures
A strong focus on codifying practitioner architectural experience as principles:
  • Principles represent underlying and long-enduring fundamentlas
  • Principles enable the architect to reason through the creation of novel architecture for which clear   recendents are not available
  • Summarized in 26 Principles of System Architecture spread throughout the text