Where Did Architecture Go?
agile-meets-architecture.com
agile-meets-architecture.com
I don't agree with this. It appeals to our sense of egalitarianism, but in practice I haven't seen it work out well.
Ideally one or at most a few people, who are also developers, owns the architecture, so that it is consistent. They should be senior developers who still work on real features in the code base to avoid architecture astronautism.
Consistency in architecture is more important than genius in architecture in most cases. Let a thousand flowers bloom elsewhere in your life.
It's pretty common nowadays that only the "tech lead" or the most senior engineers discuss architectural topics that affect the whole team, but the most junior engineers are left behind.
Large software systems are complex, and there is too much detail for any one person to dive deep into everything, so in my opinion, you discuss overall architecture with the team, but critically, you explain _why_ you are proposing a certain approach, because more junior people don't have this context. Then, you ask the other folks to help you go deep into investigations on whether your architecture is compatible with the details.
If as a TL, you are not teaching and nurturing your young 'uns, you're doing a bad job.
I am in a position where I am doing TL-level decisions, and try quite hard to demo, discuss, share the details and rationale. I write design proposals, documentation, do demo sessions, etc
But the information is just not flowing, and I notice how little the juniors participate in anything. And I don't exactly know what to put my finger on. It's probably some soft-skill I'm lacking, and that I do not know how to improve
But a part of me still feels that that perhaps the young 'uns are just... too fresh. Or that the approach is just too optimistic
In my experience, usually, lack of participation comes from a lack of self confidence in one's understanding of software development, and usually, finding something small and delegating ownership to a junior engineer, with some oversight, gets them to participate more. You have to let go of the notion of having something done perfectly and allow them to make their own mistakes, but don't let them make huge ones. This is the most common case. There are also people who don't care (can't do much here), or aren't very good technically.
Yep that's it... let's not have management or leadership take any responsibility. It's the subordinates fault of course.
To make this work, the architecture needs to be somewhat simple. Architecture astronautics fail the "everyone can keep it in their head" test.
I think they stole that idea (everybody has the architecture in their head) from Extreme Programming.
In tech, there’s often many right answers and a leader’s job is to ensure the team lands on one of them, not necessarily the leader’s favorite one. You’ll end up with far more inconsistencies if you have high employee turnover. Team cohesion is often more important than getting all the technical details perfect.
This. Architects have to have a really quite rare blend of skills: superbly diplomatic yet inclusive, and ideally in it for the long-haul.
You can keep your _feelings_ ... takes a few iterations to spot this toxic bullshit. Be explicit. Not everyone needs to get a participation star. The hired developers that were tricked into a false development process will eventually call out this bs and leave. Depending how gullible they are may take them longer.
I dont need to feel like I'm being heard. I need you to hear me if you're going to ask.
I think it's similar in development, the lead architect or vp or whatever, drives the vision of the overall architecture, architects shape those big things and drive the devs toward that direction
Building new, coherent architecture that your team will be willing to follow for years or decades is non-trivial and not something you can learn by going to college and/or consuming a bunch of bullshit tutorials from the internet. Architecture cannot be forked or cloned. It must be applied uniquely to the problem at hand.
To continue the analogy - You simply have to have tried to make that pasta dish so many fucking times that you become god of pasta dishes. You need to have customers (and employees) complain at you for 2 decades about various aspects of your cooking for you to truly understand what works and what doesnt.
> Consistency in architecture is more important than genius in architecture in most cases
Absolutely agree. This is why suggestions like "just use 1 big database for everything" are automatically a leap in the right direction for all involved. Only when this starts to get yucky should you turn on the clever bits of your brain.
The specific code arrangement is not that important, as long as the team understands some common domain model (types, properties & relations). The most successful architecture is one that the entire team can understand and communicate about without a senior developer babysitting them.
If you make one of those people the "God of architecture" you're not only going to piss off the other one you will probably lose the benefit of their experience. If theyre not responsible for architecture they'll pay commensurately less attention to it. Thats a waste of a salary.
The only scenario I can think of where it to promote one above all others would really be worth it would be if you otherwise cant stop the team from bickering.
As for juniors - if anything I tend to feel like theyre too deferent even when encouraged to speak up and take ownership. The only exception is when they dont realize they are making an architectural decision.
If a developer, especially a senior developer throws a hissy fit, they’re a Diva and toxic, not a Senior Developer.
Don't even get me started on Conway's Law. I'm so tired of people proposing "fixes" to architecture that simply can't be supported by the existing organization. Your architecture is crap if your organization can't support it, period end.
Your architecture is also crap if it doesn't meet the expectations of the stakeholders. So architects have to manage those expectations as well. Then there's always the developer who wants to use the latest shiny and new technology so they can put it on their CV. Architects have to manage all that and then some.
Yet the agilists preach that architecture is going to simply "emerge." Ha! The only architecture I've ever seen emerge is of the same nature of what emerges from one's rear end!
At the end of the day you need one person responsible for the architecture and design of the system. You just need to make sure that person isn't a diva and seeks and listens to feedback and concerns from the development team. Good architects are worth their weight in gold.
It may be unpopular to prefer a top-down approach, but in my experience architecture set by an architecture team who understand how the building blocks fit together, who have a roadmap and a set of common rules and tools (not loose principles or "guidelines") have been the most successful, sane, and enjoyable projects to work on. YMMV - and there are certainly some terrible "architects" out there whatever approach you take.
Related: I am convinced that you will learn more about a Senior Engineer at interview during a Systems Design task than any coding task. This is what sets apart great engineers from good engineers.
>Senior Engineer at interview during a Systems Design
I also pretty strongly disagree with this. The right answer to systems design in 95%+ of cases is a single application modularized using language tools talking to a single DB. Most of us don't deal with the scale that requires a constellation of systems.
I think this might be a difference in opinion on whether we're referring to the architecture of a codebase or architecture of a system. They're different things.
> The right answer to systems design in 95%+ of cases is a single application modularized using language tools talking to a single DB.
There are still a ton of systems design considerations to take into account with a monolithic approach. Good architecture doesn't necessarily always imply a microservices architecture, I agree, but it doesn't mean all architecture concerns can be ignored - you just have a different set of things to optimise for.
Either way you have to be hands on. I'm not sure how you can be hands on with a system without being in the code but I suppose anything is possible.
>There are still a ton of systems design considerations to take into account with a monolithic approach. Good architecture doesn't necessarily always imply a microservices architecture, I agree, but it doesn't mean all architecture concerns can be ignored - you just have a different set of things to optimise for.
Not really. You need to pick a language/framework & decide on your module boundaries. After that it's mostly building out functionality in the right module following the path your language/framework lays out.
You are in fact describing a specific architectural approach, which is not optimal for all situations. OP is considering a general approach to architecture and roles.
This paragraph resonated well with me. Someone does need to make sure good decisions are made (and by extension, how we define "good" and "goals" for the architecture), but the team should understand the how and why, and be part of those discussions. IMHO, this elevates the team as a whole.
Nobody on an agile team today thinks to ask the Systems Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Architects, etc, whether their design might need changes. They have been told they alone are responsible for building the thing, so they steam right ahead. There is no adult in the room to get them to do due diligence, so it just doesn't get done. So Architects are now just a silo of red tape.
And it’s not totally bad, albeit still frustrating. All the good architecture in the world doesn't matter if you can’t build a product that people want to use. Similar to design.
I’ve been at a place once where people held others accountable to architectural concerns in PR. The reviews took longer and honestly it was exhausting at times but also probably one of the periods I developed most as an engineer if I look back at my career.
All this leads me to the conclusion that there’s a time and place to entertain the finer details of code structure and system architecture. And it’s not when you don’t have a product. It’s only once you have a proven business that needs to be concerned with the scalability, understandability, ease of teaching others, modularization and ability to reuse, etc. that these things even start to become smelly.
!Final note that a greenfield product must still be designed and engineered and build, but that’s not architecture. Architecture adds aesthetic qualities (that are ideally practical and functional as well) to a system.
Anyway, if you're able to iterate on the design pattern before writing code, it can often only take a day or two, and then you don't have to spend another sprint re-writing the whole thing or whatever. Code reviews become a lot quicker/easier now as well, because you don't have to think about other design patterns while reviewing code, just the pattern already agreed on.
Stands to reason. They provide thoughts about organizing people, not tech. However, they also do not explicitly state that you should throw software engineering out the window, so one can reasonably assume that engineering practices still apply.
you get a bag of little 2 week efforts
...which, indeed, is a likely outcome as implementation is really hard, especially in a constrained developer market where you can't just select the best of the best as you please and are often left to hire the warm bodies you can find. However, it remains that the thoughts provided encourage you to stay away from this, even if doing so in reality isn't quite so simple.
I kind of don't care what the authors of the manifesto said - no one seems to do it that way
Everyone is excited during sprint#1; by sprint#10 the finger pointing and scapegoating begins
"To stay relevant in today’s fast-moving world, architects must focus less on making the most important architectural decisions, and instead focus on building an environment where everyone makes better decisions."
Ye sure ... as powerless as a Scrum master to actually make decisions but to nagg about process I guess. No one in charge of the tech but still micromanaging managers coming for you. Architects that don't make drawings. God a distaste Agile. Why are apologists still trying.
"Diversity tickets available"
What does this mean? Discounts for women etc?
They should be doing both.
What remains relevant, though, is the "software architecture" – how you structure your data, what kinds of abstractions do you build over that data, is the data model suitable for the task at hand, etc.
Architecture is not about infrastructure at all. Infrastructure provides the constraints that the design must accomodate within its functional and non-functional requirements.
It's how you use that infrastructure. Is it event-sourced, CQRS, eventually consistent? How are your services structured? Around resources with state transfer and media types, or more RPC? That's the architectural choices.
Scaled Agile pretty explicitly covers every aspect of the development process.
One of the biggest aspects is to avoid "Big Up Front Design" or essentially over-engineering things when you probably don't have all of the information yet. This carries across multiple aspects of SAFe and usually creates conflict in people who want to be handed a complete specification.
For some people, it's a mindset change. For me, it makes sense. I don't want to be handed a complete spec written by other people. I want to be handed a best guess with requirements that I, as the person who will be implementing it, can refine, provide feedback, ask questions and help get to a better implementation.
It assumes the people closest to the problem space (you) will have the best understanding of how to solve the problem.
I have an experience in a relatively big corporation. Before Agile (around a decade back), it was more or less waterfall, we documented what we wanted to code as a feature, how it should work, did several rounds of review, and then we coded it to that spec.
Today, I am lucky if we have time to do the spec before coding. The most important thing is to have stories in our project management tool, which contain no real information about the specification. Customer validation is paramount but the technical soundness is mostly lacking.
I had many discussions with Agile proponents about this problem, with different suggestions, but it never changed our actual processes (or general lack of thereof).
If I had to make an analogy with house construction, it would go as this. In the old days, we did what is usually done, you have a picture of a house you want and from that, architect (or engineers) create actual blueprints, engineering documentation, which describes what is to be built. Then based on that you create estimates, timelines and manage the project. (And in real construction, they actually also create "as-built" documentation, for maintenance.)
Today, it's like no actual engineering documentation is created. So basically, product owner draws a picture of the future house, gives it to each of the workers (not to mention another problem of Agile, lack of specialization, there is no distinction between masons and welders and plumbers and electricians), and tell them, look this what you should build, go ahead and somehow do it.
What usually happens is they all start frantically working at something, and before you know it, you have ceiling on side of the house 10 cm below the other side. Or two sets of electrical wiring.
Now it's important to understand I am in no way dissing the workers (or coders), on the contrary. This happens despite (or maybe because) they are all very smart and productive and well-meaning. I certainly think that architect throwing design over the wall to be "coded" is an anti-pattern. People need to cooperate, but there needs to be process, reviews and documentation, otherwise it's gonna end up real messy. And the calls for "team responsibility" seem to be rather utopian to me.
Also, I am very much in favor of Agile as a project management method, especially Kanban (see also Steve Yegge's Good Agile, Bad Agile) - of course if you don't need deadlines.
But I don't believe, as Agile seems to claim, that you can build a two-story house (something that requires a foundation, which is famously not customer facing) by quickly iterating on a tent or a wooden shed. At some point, you need to demolish it all and build the damn foundation. The product management cannot excuse themselves, we don't know whether we end up building a bungalow or a skyscraper, just be flexible. The engineers need to know, in advance.
Which brings me to an interesting point. There is an old wisdom, that the problems you find earlier in the design cycle are easier (and less expensive) to fix. Agile claims, that it's easier (and less expensive) to write and refactor the wrong code, than to properly discuss and review architecture. I call BS on that. (The other point that Fred Brooks makes is there should be a responsible design leader, i.e. architect. This is not contradictory to egalitarianism - developers should be involved in the design of the features they will work on and they should all try to lead the design of a feature from time to time.)
To conclude, I think with Agile, SW engineering has gotten much more away from actual engineering than it used to be. I think this is fixable, but people need to accept that proper engineering documentation (AKA architectural specification) is required, and stories and acceptance criteria are no replacement for that.