Is there still room for architecture in an agile engineering organisation? Of course there is. There is a perception that agile teams are self-contained groups of generalists who should be left alone to self-organise and build software. This is true, but development teams still need to make architecture decisions all the time. There does come a point at which problems are too big for any one self-organising team to solve. Some design co-ordination is needed.
28 March 2024
Knowing what decisions to make and when to make them can be something of a fine art
8 January 2024
There is a spectrum of different styles of architecture governance, from the tightly structured and framework-driven, through to the deliberate absence of formal architecture.
2 September 2023
How should you go about building an architecture practice in organisations where people are allowed to say “no”? Ultimately, this becomes an exercise in persuasion, pragmatism, and patience.
15 July 2023
Most internal shared libraries are based on the fallacy that code sharing always makes development more efficient.
2 March 2023
Agile practices on their own are no guarantee of fast flow. You also need a planned architecture that enables team autonomy and supports rapid, iterative delivery.
14 November 2022
Internal developer platforms are supposed to be so compelling that engineering teams will flock to them, but are we givng teams any real choice?
3 August 2022
Writing a good unit test suite is hard. Many test suites don’t provide any meaningful benefits, merely serving as an unreliable and unloved extension of the main code base.
12 June 2022
Adopting inner source is more than just a matter of putting a project into GitHub and accepting pull requests.
17 May 2022
Larger organisations are beset with complexity that can’t be fully addressed by autonomous teams focusing on value. At least frameworks like SAFe recognise this and attempt to offer solutions based on experience.
6 February 2022
If we’re serious about empowering engineering teams to make decisions, then we should be embedding architectural skills rather than architects themselves.
3 August 2021
A lean approach suggests that features can be proven in quick prototypes before being implemented ‘properly’. Alas, things don’t always work out that way…
17 April 2021
Architects have a key role in setting the direction of travel for development, giving them an opportunity to help foster a good developer experience for an organisation.
8 January 2021
Estimates are difficult, usually wrong, and frequently misused, especially at the “epic” level. An “appetite” can be a more meaningful measure that defines the amount of time the business is prepared to invest in the solution.
24 August 2020
There can be a tension between the lean, experimental nature of agile development and the more deliberate, planned demands of a large organisation. It does not have to be like this.
11 March 2020
The discipline of architecture is an important part of any efficient engineering organisation. It just needs to adapt its game from the process-orientated “Enterprise Architecture” of old to something more collaborative and relevant.