Book excerpt: This book covers all you need to know to model and design software applications from use cases to software architectures in UML and shows how to apply the COMET UML-based modeling and design method to real-world problems. The author describes architectural patterns for various architectures, such as broker, discovery, and transaction patterns for service-oriented architectures, and addresses software quality attributes including maintainability, modifiability, testability, traceability, scalability, reusability, performance, availability, and security. Complete case studies illustrate design issues for different software architectures: a banking system for client/server architecture, an online shopping system for service-oriented architecture, an emergency monitoring system for component-based software architecture, and an automated guided vehicle for real-time software architecture. Organized as an introduction followed by several short, self-contained chapters, the book is perfect for senior undergraduate or graduate courses in software engineering and design, and for experienced software engineers wanting a quick reference at each stage of the analysis, design, and development of large-scale software systems.