Evolutionary architecture in agile environment

Speaker: Xavier Rene-Corail

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“Conflicts”

• Not that we don’t have a plan. We have a plan. But it can change
• Emerging design – do have a high level design. Not chaos
• Things change. There’s nothing that will not change. Make easy to change the things that will/might.
• Prototype architecture. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Architects shouldn’t deliver paper docs

Software architecture is

• “the important stuff (whatever that is)” – Ralph Johnson
• finding internal *abiities
• managing conflicting *abilities and determining which is most important

Agility is

• ability to move quickly and easily – Oxford dictionary

Evolution of architectural styles

• Monolith – not scalable, single point of failure
• Layered – defacto standard for JEE apps
• SOA – natively scalable, but cn turn into monolith
• Microservices – now need orchestration
• Severless – abstract more

Beware of

• Dependency hell/service dependencies
• Distributed transactions

General

• Minimize coupling
• Couple fro highly changing to infrequently changing
• Ask users for feedback. Don’t overarchitect
• Feature flags. Make safe to fail
• Eat an elephant one bite at a time. Design that way too

Decide up front – programming languages and frameworks. These are difficult to change.

My take: Good session. My notes are “less good” because I was eating lunch during the design principles. So listening, but not blogging!