Talk:C4 model

Keeling reference?

The reference to Keeling's book "Design it! ...", i.e.,

  "C4 model documents the architecture of a software system, by showing multiple points of view[5], ..."

seems haphazard at best, but with such a general statement, it almost takes on a promotional or spammy nature.

Should the statement be made more detailed so the reference is worthwhile, or should it be removed? 85.230.90.41 (talk) 07:56, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No it's not of promotional nature. When I wrote the article, I did an extensive research to find some reliable secondary sources on C4 to prove its notoriety and provide evidence that it's sufficiently known to deserve an article on Wikipedia. Most information publicly available are on C4's website, the C4 article that preceded the website, and the C4 videos. The great thing is that it's all free. But it's all primary sources by the single author of C4. This was a risk of rejection of the article, because anybody can create a website, publish articles on InfoQ and videos on Youtube. So I used all the published reference that I found (there were not so many at that time).

I think it's worthwhile to keep this reference. Brown documents his modeling notation with "multiple levels" of abstraction, which could look like a simple hierarchical decomposition. The quoted book referred interestingly to multiple views. This presents well what C4 allows to do. And multiple views are one of the fundamental characteristic of architecture modeling since the famous article on 4+1 architectural view model. It is therefore an independent confirmation of the suitability for architecture models.

For software engineers working daily with models, all this may seem obvious, and the C4 relevance and audience is not questioned anymore. But on Wikipedia, we need to bring objective, independent and verifiable references, also for people who are not working in the SW field. In this regard, three independent sources seem a minimum (the fourth independent source, is an academic article, peer reviewed since it's for a conference... but as it was still authored by Brown, I think it does not sufficiently meet the independence criteria)

Christophe (talk) 20:18, 8 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]