Enabling architecture

“While we must acknowledge emergence in design and system development, a little planning can avoid much waste.”

The architecture of a system must support the ability to provide frequent, independent releases to meet business objectives. In addition, the architecture must be easily adaptable to strategy changes. This is achieved by evolutionary design and a combination of both intentional and emergent architecture. Architects will spend less time defining ‘intentional’, big-upfront architecture and more time with constantly assessing incoming use cases to evaluate their potential impact on the current design.


Safety Advice
As with many analogies that are being applied to the digital world the Architecture analogy is one that is being misused the most. A construction architect would work mostly on the usage and the appearance of the building. So in comparison this would be a UX Engineer. What we mean with Software Architecture are Construction Engineers. A Software architecture has by its nature a dynamic construction that needs constant refinement. Thus the major focus is to identify the parts that are becoming to stiff and brittle over time. Software Architects should thus act more like Gardeners than Construction Engineers.



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Recommended Resources

  1. “Agile Architecture” – Molly Dishman & Martin Fowler Keynote
  2. How enterprise agility will redefine architecture by Jeremy Drumm

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