Philippe Kruchten on Architecture and Technical Debt
Philippe recently spoke at the SDC conference about the importance of architecture, the relationship between architecture and Agile methods and the impact of technical debt.
An interesting perspective on Agile and Architecture...
Depending on the detection and notification, there can be quite a delay before failover is initiated at all. (I once spoke with a retailer whose primary notification mechanism seemed to be the Marketing VP's wife.)
My suggestion to the team was that they put their creation story on the landing page. If I could read about the moment they had their cool idea, they would have given me two valuable gifts–the emotional energy to keep working at understanding their idea and the beginnings of an intellectual understanding as well.
The essence of sketching is selectivity. With forward sketching you rough out some issues in code you are about to write, usually discussing them with a group of people with your team. Your aim is to use the sketches to help communicate ideas and alternatives about what you're about to do. You don't talk about all the code you are going to work on, just important issues that you want to run past your colleagues first, or sections of the design that you want to visualize before you begin programming.
secretGeek (@secretGeek):A design is complete not when there is nothing more to add but rather when the client's wallet has nothing left to remove.
— Leon Bambrick (@secretGeek) March 30, 2010
via Twittelator
When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.
These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.
The big secret is requirements traceability. Each and every architectural decision must be strongly derived from forces (i.e., requirements and risks). This also helps to keep the architecture simple, expressive and balanced, because this way we can get rid of all these design pearls smart developers and architects typically invent.
Applications have a natural tendency to grow. If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly. Features are always more complex than you think, and many small features quickly add up to one large mess.
