The ideal audience of this book includes anyone who works within, or who follows, SEI's (Software Engineering Institute's) extensive body of work on architecture and/or product line engineering, or who needs to develop a project management framework for software development. While the approach in this book is more suited for product-oriented development, it can also be used for major internal projects.
As the title implies, the focus on the project management framework is the architecture, and the key elements of the approach are planning, organizing, implementing and measuring. The latter element lends itself to continuous refinement and fits nicely into CMM level 4 and 5 organization, which is not surprising since the CMM is embedded in practically every guide produced by SEI.
What makes this book special, though, is the clearly defined approach that is systematically presented using case studies and frequent diagrams to orient you as you go through the book. More importantly, the author communicates a vision and shows how to put it into practice.
I like the approach because it lends itself to realistic project planning and estimation. By taking an architecture-centric approach it's easy to develop a complete work breakdown structure early in the planning phase, which provides a foundation for detailed estimating. I also like the way the approach separates, then integrates, team organization, requirements and strategy, risk management and release planning.
This is not another project management methodology, but instead, shows how to use architecture as the focal point of the project and use whatever specific PM methodology suits your organization to effectively define project deliverables and the final product. It's complete, realistic and will work in practice.
