FotoMaX

FotoMaX is the photo kiosk you find in a drugstore or supermarket: a screen, a card reader, a printer, and software that turns a memory card into an order. Hendrik Lösch wrote this documentation for his workshops on architecture documentation, and it first appeared as a chapter of arc42 by Example. FotoMaX never existed as one product. Hendrik assembled it from several real cyber-physical projects, so the problems it describes are real ones: software grown since 2010, maintained by several teams, tied to special hardware, and customised for dozens of retail partners.

The documentation follows one of those problems all the way through. The kiosk software, the Wizard, began as a WPF monolith; after an architecture review in 2019 it is being turned into a modulith. Section 4 draws the migration step by step, section 9 records the decisions behind it, including a matrix that rates four architecture patterns against the ISO 25010 qualities and a weighted comparison of two application frameworks, and section 11 lists the risks the old code still carries.

Hendrik also bent the arc42 structure on purpose, and says why. The original puts the quality requirements second, right after the introduction, because they are few and all of them matter. It opens with a page that tells each reader which parts concern them, and it ends with a chapter that is not arc42 at all: onboarding checklists, review guidelines, Definition of Ready and Done, kept next to the architecture so the team treats both as one body of work. On this site the sections follow the arc42 numbering. The opening page is part of section 1, and the team chapter follows the glossary.