architecture

Extracting Microservices from a Modular Monolith

by Burkhard Stubert
2025/04/082025/04/20

When developing the operator terminals for their machines, OEMs must reinvent the wheel over and again. Each OEM implements home-grown solutions for standard features like OTA updates, user authentication, factory installation, machine gateways and IoT gateways. None of these features belong to the OEM’s core business. OEMs could save a lot of time and money, if they could buy these features as ready-made solutions from third-party vendors.

Ports-and-Adapters Architecture: The Pattern

by Burkhard Stubert
2023/08/242023/12/03
1 Comment

The ports-and-adapters architecture should be the standard architecture for HMI applications. Its parts are loosely coupled, cohesive, easy to test and easy to extend. We can apply the reverse Conway manoeuvre to create self-dependent teams with minimal dependencies on other teams. I’ll motivate the ports-and-adapters or hexagonal architecture with USB ports and adapters and look at the architecture pattern from the production, testing and team perspective. I’ll apply the architecture to the HMI terminal of a harvester.

Parking at Munich Airport: An Awful Experience

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/10/24

The parking experience at Munich Airport is awful. It is too easy to do something wrong, which can only be remedied by calling support. The bad user experience is caused by a bad system architecture. The pieces for a better architecture are already in place. Improving the interaction between these pieces improves the architecture and a fortiori the user experience. I can at least dream of a better parking experience in the future, although I can’t change the current one.

Visualising the Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Context and Container Diagrams

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/07/112022/07/11
2 Comments

I never got the hang of UML: overly complicated, hard to understand, too close to code. Hence, I was skeptical about C4 diagrams when I… Read More »Visualising the Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Context and Container Diagrams

Visualising Module Dependencies with CMake and Graphviz

CMake uses Graphviz to generate dependency graphs between the targets of a CMake project like libraries and executables. The graphs help us get an idea of the software architecture and identify the dependency hot spots.

Ports-and-adapters architecture for harvester terminal with GUI, Cloud, Machine and Customer adapter.

My Talk “A Successful Architecture for Qt Embedded Systems” at Qt Day Italy 2021

by Burkhard Stubert
2021/07/112021/07/18

Creating an architecture means answering many questions about the ecosystem, in which the Qt embedded system operates. While the questions are very similar for all Qt embedded systems, the answers and their priorities differ. So, you should be able to transfer the questions and answers from my running example, a harvester terminal, to your system.