Technical leadership and the balance with

agility
Software Architecture for Developers - Volume 1
Simon Brown
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For Kirstie, Matthew and Oliver

Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Software architecture has a bad reputation
Agile aspirations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So you think youre an architect? . . . . . .
The frustrated architect . . . . . . . . . . .

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i
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About the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Why did I write the book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A new approach to software development? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vi

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

What is software architecture?

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1.

What is architecture? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As a noun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As a verb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2.

Types of architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What do they all have in common? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3.

What is software architecture? . . . . . . . . . .

Application architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
System architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Software architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Enterprise architecture - strategy rather than code

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CONTENTS

4.

Architecture vs design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making a distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding significance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5.

Is software architecture important? . . . . . . . . . .

A lack of software architecture causes problems . . . . .
The benefits of software architecture . . . . . . . . . . .
Does every software project need software architecture?

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Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

14

II

The software architecture role .

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The software architecture role . . . .

1. Architectural Drivers . . . . . . . . .
2. Designing Software . . . . . . . . . .
3. Technical Risks . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Architecture Evolution . . . . . . . .
5. Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Quality Assurance . . . . . . . . . .
Collaborate or fail . . . . . . . . . . . .
Technical leadership is a role, not a rank
Create your own definition of the role .

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8.

Should software architects code? . . . . . . . . . . . .

Writing code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Building prototypes, frameworks and foundations . . .
Performing code reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Experimenting and keeping up to date . . . . . . . . . .
The tension between software architects and employers
You dont have to give up coding . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dont code all the time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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9.

Software architects should be master builders

State of the union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Back in time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Did master builders actually build? . . . . . . .
Ivory towers? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CONTENTS

Divergence of the master builder role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Achieving the role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Architects need to work with the teams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10. From developer to architect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Experience is a good gauge but you need to look deeper
The line is blurred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Crossing the line is our responsibility . . . . . . . . . .

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11. Broadening the T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Deep technology skills . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Breadth of knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Software architects are generalising specialists
Software architecture is a technical career . . .

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12. Soft skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Stay positive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37
38

13. Software development is not a relay sport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Solution Architects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Somebody needs to own the big picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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14. Software architecture introduces control? .

Provide guidance, strive for consistency . . .
How much control do you need? . . . . . . .
Control varies with culture . . . . . . . . . .
A lever, not a button . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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15. Mind the gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Developers focus on the low-level detail . . . . . .
Architects dictate from their ivory towers . . . . .
Reducing the gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A collaborative approach to software architecture

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16. Where are the software architects of tomorrow?

Coaching, mentoring and apprenticeships . . . . .
Were losing our technical mentors . . . . . . . . .
Software teams need downtime . . . . . . . . . .

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17. Everybody is an architect, except when theyre not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

CONTENTS

Everybody is an architect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Except when theyre not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Does agile need architecture? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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18. Software architecture as a consultant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Domain knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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19. Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

54

III

Designing software

20. Architectural drivers . . .

1. Functional requirements
2. Quality Attributes . . .
3. Constraints . . . . . . .
4. Principles . . . . . . . .
Understand their influence

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21. Quality Attributes (non-functional requirements) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Which are important to you? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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22. Working with non-functional requirements

Capture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Refine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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23. Constraints . . . . . . . . . .
Time and budget constraints .
Technology constraints . . . .
People constraints . . . . . . .
Organisational constraints . .
Are all constraints bad? . . . .
Constraints can be prioritised .
Listen to the constraints . . . .

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24. Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Development principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Architecture principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CONTENTS

Beware of best practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25. Technology is not an implementation detail . . . .
1. Do you have complex non-functional requirements?
2. Do you have constraints? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3 Do you want consistency? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deferral vs decoupling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Every decision has trade-offs . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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71

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26. More layers = more complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Non-functional requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Time and budget - nothing is free . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

75
76
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27. Collaborative design can help and hinder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Experience influences software design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78
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28. Software architecture is a platform for conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Software development isnt just about delivering features . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80
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29. Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

82

IV Agility and the essence of software architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

30. The conflict between agile and architecture - myth or reality? . . . . . . . .

Conflict 1: Team structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conflict 2: Process and outputs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Software architecture provides boundaries for TDD, BDD, DDD, RDD and clean
code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Separating architecture from ivory towers and big up front design . . . . . . . .

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31. Quantifying risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Probability vs impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Prioritising risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

88
88
89

32. Risk-storming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Step 1. Draw some architecture diagrams .
Step 2. Identify the risks individually . . . .
Step 3. Converge the risks on the diagrams

90
90
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91

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CONTENTS

Step 4. Prioritise the risks .

Mitigation strategies . . .
When to use risk-storming
Collective ownership . . .

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33. Just enough up front design . . . . . . . . .

It comes back to methodology . . . . . . . .
You need to do just enough . . . . . . . . .
How much is just enough? . . . . . . . . .
Firm foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Contextualising just enough up front design .

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. 95
. 95
. 97
. 98
. 99
. 100

34. Agility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding agility . . . . . .
A good architecture enables agility
Agility as a quality attribute . . .

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102
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35. Introducing software architecture . . . .

Software architecture needs to be accessible
Some practical suggestions . . . . . . . . .
Making change happen . . . . . . . . . . .
The essence of software architecture . . . .

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106
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36. Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

37. Appendix A: Financial Risk System
Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Functional Requirements . . . . . . .
Non-functional Requirements . . . .

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113
113
114
114

Preface
The IT industry is either taking giant leaps ahead or its in deep turmoil. On the one
hand were pushing forward, reinventing the way that we build software and striving for
craftsmanship at every turn. On the other though, were continually forgetting the good of
the past and software teams are still screwing up on an alarmingly regular basis.
Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet its
frustratingly neglected by many teams. Whether performed by one person or shared amongst
the team, the software architecture role exists on even the most agile of teams yet the balance
of up front and evolutionary thinking often reflects aspiration rather than reality.

Software architecture has a bad reputation

I tend to get one of two responses if I introduce myself as a software architect. Either people
think its really cool and want to know more or they give me a look that says I want to talk
to somebody that actually writes software, not a box drawing hand-waver. The software
architecture role has a bad reputation within the IT industry and its not hard to see where
this has come from.
The thought of software architecture conjures up visions of ivory tower architects doing
big design up front and handing over huge UML (Unified Modeling Language) models or
200 page Microsoft Word documents to an unsuspecting development team as if they were
the second leg of a relay race. And thats assuming the architect actually gets involved
in designing software of course. Many people seem to think that creating a Microsoft
PowerPoint presentation with a slide containing a big box labelled Enterprise Service Bus
is software design. Oh, and we mustnt forget the obligatory narrative about ROI (return
on investment) and TCO (total cost of ownership) that will undoubtedly accompany the
presentation.
Many organisations have an interesting take on software development as a whole too. For
example, theyve seen the potential cost savings that offshoring can bring and therefore see
the coding part of the software development process as being something of a commodity.
The result tends to be that local developers are pushed into the higher value software
architecture jobs with an expectation that all coding will be undertaken by somebody else. In
many cases this only exaggerates the disconnect between software architecture and software

Preface

ii

development, with people often being pushed into a role that they are not prepared for. These
same organisations often tend to see software architecture as a rank rather than a role too.

Agile aspirations
Agile might be over ten years old, but its still the shiny new kid in town and many software
teams have aspirations of becoming agile. Agile undoubtedly has a number of benefits
but it isnt necessarily the silver bullet that everybody wants you to believe it is. As with
everything in the IT industry, theres a large degree of evangelism and hype surrounding
it. Start a new software project today and its all about self-organising teams, automated
acceptance testing, continuous delivery, retrospectives, Kanban boards, emergent design and
a whole host of other buzzwords that youve probably heard of. This is fantastic but often
teams tend to throw the baby out with the bath water in their haste to adopt all of these cool
practices. Non-functional requirements not sounding cool isnt a reason to neglect them.
Whats all this old-fashioned software architecture stuff anyway? Many software teams
seem to think that they dont need software architects, throwing around terms like selforganising team, YAGNI (you arent going to need it), evolutionary architecture and
last responsible moment instead. If they do need an architect, theyll probably be on the
lookout for an agile architect. Im not entirely sure what this term actually means, but I
assume that it has something to do with using post-it notes instead of UML or doing TDD
(test-driven development) instead of drawing pictures. That is, assuming they get past the
notion of only using a very high level system metaphor and dont use emergent design as
an excuse for foolishly hoping for the best.

So you think youre an architect?

It also turns out there are a number of people in the industry claiming to be software
architects whereas theyre actually doing something else entirely. I can forgive people
misrepresenting themselves as an Enterprise Architect when theyre actually doing handson software architecture within a large enterprise. The terminology in our industry is often
confusing after all.
But what about those people that tend to exaggerate the truth about the role they play on
software teams? Such irresponsible architects are usually tasked with being the technical
leader yet fail to cover the basics. Ive seen public facing websites go into a user acceptance
testing environment with a number of basic security problems, a lack of basic performance

Preface

iii

testing, basic functionality problems, broken hyperlinks and a complete lack of documentation. And that was just my external view of the software, who knows what the code looked
like. If youre undertaking the software architecture role and youre delivering stuff like this,
youre doing it wrong. This isnt software architecture, its also foolishly hoping for the best.

The frustrated architect

Admittedly not all software teams are like this but what Ive presented here isnt a straw
man either. Unfortunately many organisations do actually work this way so the reputation
that software architecture has shouldnt come as any surprise.
If we really do want to succeed as an industry, we need to get over our fascination with
shiny new things and starting asking some questions. Does agile need architecture or does
architecture actually need agile? Have we forgotten more about good software design than
weve learnt in recent years? Is foolishly hoping for the best sufficient for the demanding
software systems were building today? Does any of this matter if were not fostering the
software architects of tomorrow? How do we move from frustration to serenity?

About the book

This book is a practical, pragmatic and lightweight guide to software architecture, specifically
aimed at developers, and focussed around the software architecture role and process.

Why did I write the book?

Like many people, I started my career as a software developer, taking instruction from my
seniors and working with teams to deliver software systems. Over time, I started designing
smaller pieces of software systems and eventually evolved into a position where I was
performing what I now consider to be the software architecture role.
Ive worked for IT consulting organisations for the majority of my career, and this means
that most of the projects that Ive been involved with have resulted in software systems
being built either for or with our customers. In order to scale an IT consulting organisation,
you need more people and more teams. And to create more teams, you need more software
architects. And this leads me to why I wrote this book:
1. Software architecture needs to be more accessible: Despite having some fantastic
mentors, I didnt find it easy to understand what was expected of me when I was
moving into my first software architecture roles. Sure, there are lots of software
architecture books out there, but they seem to be written from a different perspective. I
found most of them very research oriented or academic in nature, yet I was a software
developer looking for real-world advice. I wanted to write the type of book that I would
have found useful at that stage in my career - a book about software architecture aimed
at software developers.
2. All software projects need software architecture: I like agile approaches, I really
do, but the lack of explicit regard for software architecture in many of the approaches
doesnt sit well with me. Agile approaches dont say that you shouldnt do any up front
design, but they often dont explicitly talk about it either. Ive found that this causes
people to jump to the wrong conclusion and Ive seen the consequences that a lack of
any up front thinking can have. I also fully appreciate that big design up front isnt the
answer either. Ive always felt that theres a happy medium to be found where some
up front thinking is done, particularly when working with a team that has a mix of

About the book

experiences and backgrounds. I favour a lightweight approach to software architecture

that allows me to put some building blocks in place as early as possible, to stack the
odds of success in my favour.
3. Lightweight software architecture practices: Ive learnt and evolved a number of
practices over the years, which Ive always felt have helped me to perform the software
architecture role. These relate to the software design process and identifying technical
risks through to communicating and documenting software architecture. Ive always
assumed that these practices are just common sense, but Ive discovered that this isnt
the case. Ive taught these practices to thousands of people over the past few years and
Ive seen the difference they can make. A book helps me to spread these ideas further,
with the hope that other people will find them useful too.

A new approach to software development?

This book isnt about creating a new approach to software development, but it does seek
to find a happy mid-point between the excessive up front thinking typical of traditional
methods and the lack of any architecture thinking that often happens in software teams who
are new to agile approaches. There is room for up front design and evolutionary architecture
to coexist.

About the author

Im an independent software development consultant specialising in software architecture;
specifically technical leadership, communication and lightweight, pragmatic approaches
to software architecture. In addition to being the author of Software Architecture for
Developers, Im the creator of the C4 software architecture model and I built Structurizr,
which is a web-based tool to create software architecture diagrams based upon the C4 model.
I regularly speak at software development conferences, meetups and organisations around
the world; delivering keynotes, presentations and workshops about software architecture.
In 2013, I won the IEEE Software sponsored SATURN 2013 Architecture in Practice
Presentation Award for my presentation about the conflict between agile and architecture.
Ive spoken at events and/or have clients in over twenty countries around the world.
You can find my website at simonbrown.je and I can be found on Twitter at @simonbrown.

Acknowledgements
Although this book has my name on the front, writing a book is never a solo activity. Its
really the product of a culmination of ideas that have evolved and discussions that have taken
place over a number of years. For this reason, there are a number of people to thank.
First up are Kevin Seal, Robert Annett and Sam Dalton for lots of stuff; ranging from
blog posts on Coding the Architecture and joint conference talks through to the software
architecture user group that we used to run at Skills Matter (London) and for the many tech
chats over a beer. Kevin also helped put together the first version of the training course that, I
think, we initially ran at the QCon Conference in London, which then morphed into a 2-day
training course that we have today. His classic sound-bite icon in the slide deck still gets
people talking today. :-)
Ive had discussions about software architecture with many great friends and colleagues over
the years, both at the consulting companies where Ive worked (Synamic, Concise, Evolution
and Detica) and the customers that weve built software for. There are too many people to
name, but you know who you are.
Id also like to thank everybody who has attended one of my talks or workshops over the
past few years, as those discussions also helped shape what you find in the book. Youve all
helped; from evolving ideas to simply helping me to explain them better.
Thanks also to Junilu Lacar and Pablo Guardiola for providing feedback, spotting typos, etc.
And I should finally thank my family for allowing me to do all of this, especially when a
hectic travel schedule sometimes sees me jumping from one international consulting gig,
workshop or conference to the next. Thank you.

I What is software architecture?

In this part of the book well look at what software architecture is about, the difference
between architecture and design, what it means for an architecture to be agile and why
thinking about software architecture is important.

1. What is architecture?
The word architecture means many different things to many different people and there are
many different definitions floating around the Internet. Ive asked hundreds of people over
the past few years what architecture means to them and a summary of their answers is as
follows. In no particular order

Modules, connections, dependencies and interfaces

The big picture
The things that are expensive to change
The things that are difficult to change
Design with the bigger picture in mind
Interfaces rather than implementation
Aesthetics (e.g. as an art form, clean code)
A conceptual model
Satisfying non-functional requirements/quality attributes
Everything has an architecture
Ability to communicate (abstractions, language, vocabulary)
A plan
A degree of rigidity and solidity
A blueprint
Systems, subsystems, interactions and interfaces
Governance
The outcome of strategic decisions
Necessary constraints
Structure (components and interactions)
Technical direction
Strategy and vision
Building blocks
The process to achieve a goal
Standards and guidelines
The system as a whole

What is architecture?

Tools and methods

A path from requirements to the end-product
Guiding principles
Technical leadership
The relationship between the elements that make up the product
Awareness of environmental constraints and restrictions
Foundations
An abstract view
The decomposition of the problem into smaller implementable elements
The skeleton/backbone of the product

No wonder its hard to find a single definition! Thankfully there are two common themes here
architecture as a noun and architecture as a verb, with both being applicable regardless of
whether were talking about constructing a physical building or a software system.

As a noun
As a noun then, architecture can be summarised as being about structure. Its about the
decomposition of a product into a collection of components/modules and interactions. This
needs to take into account the whole of the product, including the foundations and infrastructure services that deal with cross-cutting concerns such as power/water/air conditioning
(for a building) or security/configuration/error handling (for a piece of software).

As a verb
As a verb, architecture (i.e. the process, architecting) is about understanding what you need
to build, creating a vision for building it and making the appropriate design decisions. All
of this needs to be based upon requirements because requirements drive architecture.
Crucially, its also about communicating that vision and introducing technical leadership
so that everybody involved with the construction of the product understands the vision and
is able to contribute in a positive way to its success.

2. Types of architecture
There are many different types of architecture and architects within the IT industry alone.
Here, in no particular order, is a list of those that people most commonly identify when
asked

Infrastructure
Security
Technical
Solution
Network
Data
Hardware
Enterprise
Application
System
Integration
IT
Database
Information
Process
Business
Software

The unfortunate thing about this list is that some of the terms are easier to define than
others, particularly those that refer to or depend upon each other for their definition. For
example, what does solution architecture actually mean? For some organisations solution
architect is simply a synonym for software architect whereas others have a specific role
that focusses on designing an overall solution to a problem, but stopping before the level
at which implementation details are discussed. Similarly, technical architecture is vague
enough to refer to software, hardware or a combination of the two.
Interestingly, software architecture typically appears near the bottom of the list when I
ask people to list the types of IT architecture theyve come across. Perhaps this reflects the
confusion that surrounds the term.

Types of architecture

What do they all have in common?

What do all of these terms have in common then? Well, aside from suffixing each of the
terms with architecture or architect, all of these types of architecture have structure and
vision in common.
Take infrastructure architecture as an example and imagine that you need to create a
network between two offices at different ends of the country. One option is to find the largest
reel of network cable that you can and start heading from one office to the other in a straight
line. Assuming that you had enough cable, this could potentially work, but in reality there are
a number of environmental constraints and non-functional characteristics that you need to
consider in order to actually deliver something that satisfies the original goal. This is where
the process of architecting and having a vision to achieve the goal is important.
One single long piece of cable is an approach, but its not a very good one because of
real-world constraints. For this reason, networks are typically much more complex and
require a collection of components collaborating together in order to satisfy the goal. From
an infrastructure perspective then, we can talk about structure in terms of the common
components that youd expect to see within this domain; things like routers, firewalls, packet
shapers, switches, etc.
Regardless of whether youre building a software system, a network or a database; a
successful solution requires you to understand the problem and create a vision that can be
communicated to everybody involved with the construction of the end-product. Architecture, regardless of the domain, is about structure and vision.

3. What is software architecture?

At first glance, software architecture seems like an easy thing to define. Its about the
architecture of a piece of software, right? Well, yes, but its about more than just software.

Application architecture
Application architecture is what we as software developers are probably most familiar with,
especially if you think of an application as typically being written in a single technology
(e.g. a Java web application, a desktop application on Windows, etc). It puts the application in
focus and normally includes things such as decomposing the application into its constituent
classes and components, making sure design patterns are used in the right way, building or
using frameworks, etc. In essence, application architecture is inherently about the lower-level
aspects of software design and is usually only concerned with a single technology stack (e.g.
Java, Microsoft .NET, etc).
The building blocks are predominantly software based and include things like programming
languages and constructs, libraries, frameworks, APIs, etc. Its described in terms of classes,
components, modules, functions, design patterns, etc. Application architecture is predominantly about software and the organisation of the code.

System architecture
I like to think of system architecture as one step up in scale from application architecture.
If you look at most software systems, theyre actually composed of multiple applications
across a number of different tiers and technologies. As an example, you might have a
software system comprised of a mobile app communicating via JSON/HTTPS to a Java web
application, which itself consumes data from a MySQL database. Each of these will have
their own internal application architecture.
For the overall software system to function, thought needs to be put into bringing all of
those separate applications together. In other words, you also have the overall structure of
the end-to-end software system at a high-level. Additionally, most software systems dont
live in isolation, so system architecture also includes the concerns around interoperability
and integration with other systems within the environment.

What is software architecture?

The building blocks are a mix of software and hardware, including things like programming
languages and software frameworks through to servers and infrastructure. Compared to
application architecture, system architecture is described in terms of higher levels of
abstraction; from components and services through to sub-systems. Most definitions of
system architecture include references to software and hardware. After all, you cant have a
successful software system without hardware, even if that hardware is virtualised somewhere
out there on the cloud.

Software architecture
Unlike application and system architecture, which are relatively well understood, the term
software architecture has many different meanings to many different people. Rather
than getting tied up in the complexities and nuances of the many definitions of software
architecture, I like to keep the definition as simple as possible. For me, software architecture
is simply the combination of application and system architecture.
In other words, its anything and everything related to the significant elements of a software
system; from the structure and foundations of the code through to the successful deployment
of that code into a live environment. When were thinking about software development as
software developers, most of our focus is placed on the code. Here, were thinking about
things like object oriented principles, classes, interfaces, inversion of control, refactoring,
automated unit testing, clean code and the countless other technical practices that help us
build better software. If your team consists of people who are only thinking about this, then
who is thinking about the other stuff?

Cross-cutting concerns such as logging and exception handling.

Security; including authentication, authorisation and confidentiality of sensitive data.
Performance, scalability, availability and other quality attributes.
Audit and other regulatory requirements.
Real-world constraints of the environment.
Interoperability/integration with other software systems.
Operational, support and maintenance requirements.
Consistency of structure and approach to solving problems/implementing features
across the codebase.
Evaluating that the foundations youre building will allow you to deliver what you set
out to deliver.

What is software architecture?

Sometimes you need to step back, away from the code and away from your development
tools. This doesnt mean that the lower-level detail isnt important because working software
is ultimately about delivering working code. No, the detail is equally as important, but the
big picture is about having a holistic view across your software to ensure that your code is
working toward your overall vision rather than against it.

Enterprise architecture - strategy rather than code

Enterprise architecture generally refers to the sort of work that happens centrally and across
an organisation. It looks at how to organise and utilise people, process and technology to
make an organisation work effectively and efficiently. In other words, its about how an
enterprise is broken up into groups/departments, how business processes are layered on
top and how technology underpins everything. This is in very stark contrast to software
architecture because it doesnt necessarily look at technology in any detail. Instead, enterprise
architecture might look at how best to use technology across the organisation without
actually getting into detail about how that technology works.
While some developers and software architects do see enterprise architecture as the next
logical step up the career ladder, most probably dont. The mindset required to undertake
enterprise architecture is very different to software architecture, taking a very different view
of technology and its application across an organisation. Enterprise architecture requires a
higher level of abstraction. Its about breadth rather than depth and strategy rather than code.

4. Architecture vs design
If architecture is about structure and vision, then whats design about? If youre creating a
solution to solve a problem, isnt this just design? And if this is the case, whats the difference
between design and architecture?

Making a distinction
Grady Booch has a well cited definition of the difference between architecture and design
that really helps to answer this question. In On Design, he says that
As a noun, design is the named (although sometimes unnameable) structure or
behavior of a system whose presence resolves or contributes to the resolution of
a force or forces on that system. A design thus represents one point in a potential
decision space.
If you think about any problem that youve needed to solve, there are probably a hundred
and one ways in which you could have solved it. Take your current software project for
example. There are probably a number of different technologies, deployment platforms and
design approaches that are also viable options for achieving the same goal. In designing your
software system though, your team chose just one of the many points in the potential decision
space.
Grady then goes on to say that
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture.
This makes sense because creating a solution is essentially a design exercise. However, for
some reason, theres a distinction being made about not all design being architecture, which
he clarifies with the following statement.
Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system,
where significance is measured by cost of change.

Architecture vs design

10

Essentially, hes saying that the significant decisions are architecture and that everything
else is design. In the real world, the distinction between architecture and design isnt as
clear-cut, but this definition does provide us with a basis to think about what might be
significant (i.e. architectural) in our own software systems. For example, this could include:
The shape of the system (e.g. client-server, web-based, native mobile client, distributed,
asynchronous, etc)
The structure of the software system (e.g. components, layers, interactions, etc)
The choice of technologies (i.e. programming language, deployment platform, etc)
The choice of frameworks (e.g. web MVC framework, persistence/ORM framework,
etc)
The choice of design approach/patterns (e.g. the approach to performance, scalability,
availability, etc)
The architectural decisions are those that you cant reverse without some degree of effort.
Or, put simply, theyre the things that youd find hard to refactor in an afternoon.

Understanding significance
Its often worth taking a step back and considering whats significant with your own software
system. For example, many teams use a relational database, the choice of which might
be deemed as significant. In order to reduce the amount of rework required in the event
of a change in database technology, many teams use an object-relational mapping (ORM)
framework such as Hibernate or Entity Framework. Introducing this additional ORM layer
allows the database access to be decoupled from other parts of the code and, in theory, the
database can be switched out independently without a large amount of effort.
This decision to introduce additional layers is a classic technique for decoupling distinct parts
of a software system; promoting looser coupling, higher cohesion and a better separation
of concerns. Additionally, with the ORM in place, the choice of database can probably
be switched in an afternoon, so from this perspective it may no longer be deemed as
architecturally significant.
However, while the database may no longer be considered a significant decision, the choice
to decouple through the introduction of an additional layer should be. If youre wondering
why, have a think about how long it would take you to swap out your current ORM or web
MVC framework and replace it with another. Of course, you could add another layer over
the top of your chosen ORM to further isolate your business logic and provide the ability

Architecture vs design

11

to easily swap out your ORM but, again, youve made another significant decision. Youve
introduced additional layering, complexity and cost.
Although you cant necessarily make significant decisions disappear entirely, you can use
a number of different tactics such as architectural layering to change what those significant
decisions are. Part of the process of architecting a software system is about understanding
what is significant and why.

5. Is software architecture important?

Software architecture then, is it important? The agile and software craftsmanship movements
are helping to push up the quality of the software systems that we build, which is excellent.
Together they are helping us to write better software that better meets the needs of the
business while carefully managing time and budgetary constraints. But theres still more
we can do because even a small amount of software architecture can help prevent many of
the problems that projects face. Successful software projects arent just about good code and
sometimes you need to step away from the code for a few moments to see the bigger picture.

A lack of software architecture causes problems

Since software architecture is about structure and vision, you could say that it exists anyway.
And I agree, it does. Having said that, its easy to see how not thinking about software
architecture (and the bigger picture) can lead to a number of common problems that
software teams face on a regular basis. Ask yourself the following questions:

Does your software system have a well defined structure?

Is everybody on the team implementing features in a consistent way?
Is there a consistent level of quality across the codebase?
Is there a shared vision for how the software will be built across the team?
Does everybody on the team have the necessary amount of technical guidance?
Is there an appropriate amount of technical leadership?

It is possible to successfully deliver a software project by answering no to some of these

questions, but it does require a very good team and a lot of luck. If nobody thinks about
software architecture, the end result is something that typically looks like a big ball of mud.
Sure, it has a structure but its not one that youd want to work with! Other side effects could
include the software system being too slow, insecure, fragile, unstable, hard to deploy, hard
to maintain, hard to change, hard to extend, etc. Im sure youve never seen or worked on
software projects like this, right? No, me neither. ;-)
Since software architecture is inherent in every software system, why dont we simply
acknowledge this and place some focus on it?

Is software architecture important?

13

The benefits of software architecture

What benefits can thinking about software architecture provide then? In summary:
A clear vision and roadmap for the team to follow, regardless of whether that vision
is owned by a single person or collectively by the whole team.
Technical leadership and better coordination.
A stimulus to talk to people in order to answer questions relating to significant
decisions, non-functional requirements, constraints and other cross-cutting concerns.
A framework for identifying and mitigating risk.
Consistency of approach and standards, leading to a well structured codebase.
A set of firm foundations for the product being built.
A structure with which to communicate the solution at different levels of abstraction
to different audiences.

Does every software project need software

architecture?
Rather than use the typical consulting answer of it depends, Im instead going to say that
the answer is undoubtedly yes, with the caveat that every software project should look at
a number of factors in order to assess how much software architecture thinking is necessary.
These include the size of the project/product, the complexity of the project/product, the size
of the team and the experience of the team. The answer to how much is just enough will
be explored throughout the rest of this book.

6. Questions
1. Do you know what architecture is all about? Does the rest of your team? What about
the rest of your organisation?
2. There are a number of different types of architecture within the IT domain. What do
they all have in common?
3. Do you and your team have a standard definition of what software architecture
means? Could you easily explain it to new members of the team? Is this definition
common across your organisation?
4. What does it mean if you describe a software architecture as being agile? How do
you design for agility?
5. Can you make a list of the architectural decisions on your current software project? Is
it obvious why they were deemed as significant?
6. If you step back from the code, what sort of things are included in your software
systems big picture?
7. What does the technical career path look like in your organisation? Is enterprise
architecture the right path for you?
8. Is software architecture important? Why and what are the benefits? Is there enough
software architecture on your software project? Is there too much?

II The software architecture

role
This part of the book focusses on the software architecture role; including what it is, what
sort of skills you need and why coding, coaching and collaboration are important.

7. The software architecture role

Becoming a software architect isnt something that simply happens overnight or with a
promotion. Its a role, not a rank. Its the result of an evolutionary process where youll
gradually gain the experience and confidence that you need to undertake the role. While the
term software developer is fairly well understood, software architect isnt. Here are the
things that I consider to make up the software architecture role. Notice that I said role here;
its something that can be performed by a single person or shared amongst the team.

1. Architectural Drivers
The first part of the role is about understanding the business goals and managing the
architectural drivers, which includes the requirements (both functional and non-functional)
and the constraints of the environment. Software projects often get caught up on asking users
what features they want, but rarely ask them what non-functional requirements (or quality
attributes) that they need. Sometimes the stakeholders will tell us that the system must be
fast, but thats far too subjective. Non-functional requirements and constraints often have

The software architecture role

17

a huge influence on the software architecture, so explicitly including them as a part of the
software architecture role helps to ensure that they are considered and taken into account.

2. Designing Software
It should come as no surprise that the process of designing software is a part of the software
architecture role. This is about understanding how youre going to solve the problems posed
by the architectural drivers, creating the overall structure of the software system and a vision
for the delivery. Despite how agile you to strive to be, you probably do need some time to
explicitly think about how your architecture is going to solve the problems set out by the
stakeholders because your software system isnt going to do this itself.
A key part of designing software is technology selection, which is typically a fun exercise but
it does have its fair set of challenges. For example, some organisations have a list of approved
technologies that you are forced to choose from, while others have rules in place that dont
allow open source technology with a specific licence to be used. Then you have all of the
other factors such as cost, licensing, vendor relationships, technology strategy, compatibility,
interoperability, support, deployment, upgrade policies, end-user environments and so on.
The sum of these factors can often make a simple decision of choosing something like a
rich client technology into a complete nightmare. Somebody needs to take ownership of
the technology selection process and this falls squarely within the remit of the software
architecture role.

3. Technical Risks
What weve looked at so far will help you focus on building a good solution, but it doesnt
guarantee success. Simply throwing together the best designs and the best technologies
doesnt necessary mean that the overall architecture will be successful. Theres also the
question of whether the technology choices youve made will actually work. Many teams
have a buy over build strategy and use products (commercial or open source) because of
the potential cost savings on offer. However, many teams also get burnt because they believe
the hype from vendor websites or sales executives in expensive suits. Few people seem to ask
whether the technology actually works the way it is supposed to, and fewer prove that this
is the case.
Technology selection is all about managing risk; reducing risk where there is high complexity
or uncertainty and introducing risk where there are benefits to be had. All technology
decisions need to be made by taking all factors into account, and all technology decisions

The software architecture role

18

need to be reviewed and evaluated. This potentially includes all of the major building blocks
for a software project right down to the libraries and frameworks being introduced during
the development.
The question that you need to ask yourself is whether your architecture works. For me,
an architecture works if it satisfies the non-functional requirements, works within the given
environmental constraints, provides the necessary foundations for the rest of the code and
works as the platform for solving the underlying business problem. One of the biggest
problems with software is that its complex and abstract. The result being that its hard to
visualise the runtime characteristics of a piece of software from diagrams or even the code
itself. Furthermore, I dont always trust myself to get it right first time. Your mileage may
vary though!
Throughout the software development life cycle, we undertake a number of different types
of testing in order to give us confidence that the system we are building will work when
delivered. So why dont we do the same for our architecture? If we can test our architecture,
we can prove that it works. And if we can do this as early as possible, we can reduce the
overall risk of project failure. Like good chefs, architects should taste what they are producing.
In a nutshell, this is about proactively identifying, mitigating and owning the high priority
technical risks so that your project doesnt get cancelled and you dont get fired.

4. Architecture Evolution
More often than not, software is designed and then the baton is passed over to a development
team, effectively treating software development as a relay sport. This is counterproductive
because the resulting software architecture needs to be taken care of. Somebody needs to
look after it, evolving it throughout the delivery in the face of changing requirements and
feedback from the team. If an architect has created an architecture, why shouldnt they own
and evolve that architecture throughout the rest of the delivery too? This is about continuous
technical leadership rather than simply being involved at the start of the life cycle and hoping
for the best.

5. Coding
Most of the best software architects I know have a software development background, but
for some reason many organisations dont see this as a part of the software architecture
role. Being a hands-on software architect doesnt necessarily mean that you need to get
involved in the day-to-day coding tasks, but it does mean that youre continuously engaged

The software architecture role

19

in the delivery, actively helping to lead and shape it. Having said that, why shouldnt the
day-to-day coding activities be a part of the software architecture role?
Many software architects are master builders, so it makes sense to keep those skills up to date.
In addition, coding provides a way for the architect(s) to share the software development
experience with the rest of the team, which in turn helps them better understand how the
architecture is viewed from a development perspective. Many companies have policies that
prevent software architects from engaging in coding activities because their architects are
too valuable to undertake commodity coding work. Clearly this is the wrong attitude. Why
let your software architects put all that effort into designing software if youre not going to
let them contribute to its successful delivery?
Of course, there are situations where its not practical to get involved at the code level. For
example, a large project generally means a bigger big picture to take care of and there may
be times when you just dont have the time for coding. But, generally speaking, a software
architect who codes is a more effective and happier architect. You shouldnt necessarily rule
out coding just because youre an architect.

6. Quality Assurance
Even with the best architecture in the world, poor delivery can cause an otherwise successful
software project to fail. Quality assurance should be a part of the software architecture role,
but its more than just doing code reviews. You need a baseline to assure against, which could
mean the introduction of standards and working practices such as coding standards, design
principles and tools. Quality assurance also includes ensuring that the architecture is being
implemented consistently across the team. Whether you call this architectural compliance or
conformance is up to you, but the technical vision needs to be followed.
Its safe to say that most projects dont do enough quality assurance, and therefore you
need to figure out whats important and make sure that its sufficiently assured. For me,
the important parts of a project are anything that is architecturally significant, business
critical, complex or highly visible. You need to be pragmatic though and realise that you
cant necessarily assure everything.

Collaborate or fail
Its unusual for a software system to reside in isolation and there are a number of people
that probably need to contribute to the overall architecture process. This ranges from the

The software architecture role

20

immediate development team who need to understand and buy in to the architecture, right
through to the extended team of those people who will have an interest in the architecture
from a security, database, operations, maintenance or support point of view. If youre
undertaking the software architecture role, youll need to collaborate with such people to
ensure that the resulting software system will successfully integrate with its environment. If
you dont collaborate, expect to fail.

Technical leadership is a role, not a rank

The software architecture role is basically about introducing technical leadership into a
software team and its worth repeating that what Im talking about here is a role rather
than a rank. Often large organisations use the job title of Architect as a reward for long
service or because somebody wants a salary increase. And thats fine if the person on the
receiving end of the title is capable of undertaking the role but this isnt always the case.
If youve ever subscribed to software architecture discussion groups on LinkedIn or Stack
Overflow, you might have seen questions like this.
Hi, Ive just been promoted to be a software architect but Im not sure what I
should be doing. Help! Which books should I read?
Although I cant stop organisations promoting people to roles above their capability, I can
describe what my view of the software architecture role is. Designing software might be the
fun part of the role, but a successful software project is about much more.

Create your own definition of the role

In my experience, although many software teams do understand the need for the software
architecture role, they often dont have a defined terms of reference for it. Without this, you
run the risk of the role not being performed in part or in whole.
Most of the roles that we associate with software development teams are relatively well
understood - developers, testers, ScrumMasters, Product Owners, business analysts, project
managers, etc. The software architecture role? Not so much. I regularly ask software teams
whether they have a defined terms of reference for the software architecture role and the
usual answer is along the lines of no or yes, but we dont use it. Often people working
for the same team will answer the question differently.

The software architecture role

21

Although the need for thinking about software architecture is usually acknowledged, the
responsibilities of the software architecture role often arent clear. In my experience, this
can lead to a situation where there is nobody undertaking the role, or where somebody is
assigned the role but doesnt really understand how they should undertake it. If the role
isnt understood, its not going to get done and we have little hope of growing the software
architects of tomorrow.
Regardless of what you call it (e.g. Architect, Tech Lead, Principal Designer, etc), my advice
is simple. If you dont have something that you can point at and say, this is what we expect
of our software architects, take some time to create something. Start by agreeing what is
expected of the software architecture role on your team and then move to standardise it
across your organisation if you see benefit in doing so.

8. Should software architects code?

Since I created a website called Coding the Architecture, I guess the answer to this question
shouldnt really come as a surprise. In my ideal view of the world, software architects should
code. Somebody once told me that the key characteristic of a good architect is the ability to
think in an abstract way. You can also think of it as the ability to not get caught up in the
details all of the time. Thats fine, but those boxes and lines that youre drawing do need to
be coded at some point.

Writing code
My recommendation is to make coding a part of your role as a software architect. You can do
this by simply being an integral part of the software development team. In other words, you
have a software architecture hat and a coding hat. You dont need to be the best coder on the
team, but the benefits of being hands-on and engaged in the delivery process are huge. After
all, theres a difference between knowing and doing.
Appreciating that youre going to be contributing to the coding activities often provides
enough incentive to ensure that your designs are grounded in reality. If they arent, youll
soon experience that pain once you understand the problems from a developers perspective.
In addition to the obvious benefits associated with creating a software architecture that can
actually be implemented by real people, contributing to the coding activities helps you build
rapport with the rest of the team, which in turn helps to reduce the gap between architects
and developers that you see on many software teams. To quote Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley
from their Agile Coaching book:
If you know how to program, its often tempting to make suggestions about
how developers should write the code. Be careful, because you may be wasting
your time - developers are likely to ignore your coding experience if youre not
programming on the project. They may also think that youre overstepping your
role and interfering in how they do their job, so give such advice sparingly.

Should software architects code?

23

Building prototypes, frameworks and foundations

Although the software architecture role is much easier to do if youre seen to be one of the
development team, sometimes this isnt possible. One of the problems with being promoted
to or assigned as a software architect is that you might find that you cant code as much as
youd like to. This may be down to time pressures because you have a lot of architecture
work to do, or it might simply be down to company politics not allowing you to code. Ive
seen this happen. If this is the case, building prototypes and proof of concepts related to the
software system in question is a great way to be involved. Again, this allows you to build
some rapport with the team and its a great way to evaluate that your architecture will work.
As an alternative, you could help to build the frameworks and foundations that the rest of
the team will use. Try to resist the temptation to build these things and then hand them over
to the team because this approach may backfire. Software development is driven by fads and
fashions much more than it really should be, so beware of building something that the rest
of the team might deem to be a worthless pile of old-fashioned crap!

Performing code reviews

Theres obviously no substitute for coding on a real project, and I wouldnt recommend this
as a long-term strategy, but getting involved with (or doing) the code reviews is one way to at
least keep your mind fresh with technology and how its being used. Again, you could damage
your reputation if you start nitpicking or getting involved in discussions about technologies
that you have no experience with. I remember having to explain my Java code to an architect
who had never written a single line of Java in his life. It wasnt a fun experience.

Experimenting and keeping up to date

You need to retain a certain level of technical knowledge so that you can competently design
a solution using it. But if you are unable to contribute to the delivery, how do you maintain
your coding skills as an architect?
Often youll have more scope outside of work to maintain your coding skills; from contributing to an open source project through to continuously playing with the latest language/framework/API that takes your fancy. Books, blogs, podcasts, conferences and meetups will get you
so far, but sometimes you just have to break out the code. Ive certainly done this in the past
and one of the upsides of a long commute on public transport is that it does give you time to

Should software architects code?

24

play with technology. Assuming you can keep your eyes open after a hard day at work, of
course!

The tension between software architects and

employers
Ive been fortunate in that Ive retained a large hands-on element as a part of my software
architecture roles and Ive written code on most of the development projects that Ive been
involved in. Im a firm believer that youre in control of creating your own opportunities. The
reason Ive remained hands-on comes down to expressing that its a crucial part of the role.
For me, its simple coding is essential when designing software because I need to keep my
skills up to date and understand that what Im designing will work. Plus, Im not ashamed
to admit that coding is fun.
Unfortunately many organisations seem to think that coding is the easy part of the software
development process, which is why they see an opportunity to save some money and let
somebody else do it, often in another country. Such organisations view cutting code as low
value. Tension therefore arises because theres a disconnect between the seniority of the
software architect in the organisation and the value associated with the coding activities.
In my experience, this doesnt happen in small organisations because everybody usually has
to get involved in whatever is needed. No, its those larger organisations where the tension is
greatest. I spent some time working for a medium size consulting firm where my job grade
put me as a peer of the management team, yet I still wrote code. In some ways it was quite an
achievement to be graded as an Executive Manager and write code on a daily basis! Yet it
often felt very uncomfortable, as other managers would regularly try to push my name into
boxes on the corporate organisation chart.
Being in this situation is tricky and only you can get yourself out of it. Whether youre in an
organisation where this is happening or youre looking to move on, be clear about how you
view the role of a software architect and be prepared to stand your ground.

You dont have to give up coding

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Im regularly asked whether software
architects can continue to code if they are to climb the corporate career ladder. This is a
shame, particularly if these people really enjoy the technical side of what they do.

Should software architects code?

25

My take on this is yes, absolutely, you can continue to code. For me, its quite frustrating to
hear people say, well, I understand that Ill have to give up coding to become an architect
or to progress further up the career path. There are lots of organisations where this is the
expectation and its reassuring that Im not the only person to have been told that coding
doesnt have a place in the senior ranks of an organisation.
As a software architect, you take on a great deal of responsibility for satisfying the nonfunctional requirements, performing technical quality assurance, making sure the software
is fit for purpose, etc. Its a leadership role and coding (leading by example) is one of the very
best ways to make sure the project is successful. And besides, if software architects dont
remain technical, who is growing the software architects of tomorrow?

Dont code all the time

To reiterate my advice, software architects dont have to give up coding. However you do it,
coding is a great way to keep your technology skills sharp in our ever-changing world. Many
people believe that software architecture is a post-technical career choice but it requires
deep technology skills alongside a breadth of experience and more general knowledge. It
requires T-shaped people who are able to answer the question of whether their design will
actually work. Leaving this as an implementation detail is not acceptable. Just dont code
all of the time. If youre coding all of the time, who is performing the rest of the software
architecture role?

9. Software architects should be

master builders
Applying the building metaphor to software doesnt necessarily work, although in medieval
times the people that architected buildings were the select few that made it into the exclusive
society of master builders. The clue here is in the name and a master builder really was a
master of their craft. Once elevated to this status though, did the master builder continue
to build or was that task left to those less noble? Fast-forward several hundred years and it
seems were asking the same question about the software industry.

State of the union

Software architecture has fallen out of favour over the past decade because of the association
with big up front design and analysis paralysis. Much of this stems from the desire to
deliver software systems more efficiently, with agile approaches being a major catalyst in
reducing the quantity of up front thinking that is performed by many teams. The net result
is that the role of an architect is now often seen as redundant on software teams. Many
teams are striving to be flat and self-organising, which on the face of it negates the need for
a single dedicated point of technical leadership.
The other factor here is that many believe the role of an architect is all about high-level and
abstract thinking. Im sure youve seen the terms ivory tower or PowerPoint architect
used to refer to people that design a solution without ever considering the detail. If we go
back in time though, this isnt what the architect role was all about.

Back in time
If you trace the word architect back to its roots in Latin (architectus) and Greek (arkhitekton), it basically translates to chief builder and, as indicated by the name, these people were
masters of their craft. In medieval times, the term architect was used to signify those people
who were master masons, where mason refers to stonemasons because thats what the
majority of the buildings were constructed from at the time. This quote summarises the role
well:

Software architects should be master builders

27

A master mason, then, is a manipulator of stone, an artist in stone and a designer

in stone.
This quote could equally be applied to us as software developers.

Did master builders actually build?

The key question in all of this is whether the master builders actually built anything. If you
do some research into how people achieved the role of master mason, youll find something
similar to this:
Although a master mason was a respected and usually wealthy individual, he
first had to prove his worth by going through the ranks as a stonemason and
then a supervisor, before being appointed to the highest position in his trade.
The Wikipedia page for architect says the same thing:
Throughout ancient and medieval history, most architectural design and construction was carried out by artisanssuch as stone masons and carpenters,
rising to the role of master builder.
Interestingly, theres no single view on how much building these master masons actually did.
For example:
How much contact he actually had with this substance is, however, debatable.
The terminology may differ but, as I understand it, the basic organisation and
role of the medieval master mason is similar to that of the chief architect today
perhaps a reflection of the immutable fundamentals of constructing buildings.
Only when you look at what the role entailed does this truly make sense. To use another
quote:
A mason who was at the top of his trade was a master mason. However, a Master
Mason, by title, was the man who had overall charge of a building site and
master masons would work under this person. A Master Mason also had charge
over carpenters, glaziers etc. In fact, everybody who worked on a building site
was under the supervision of the Master Mason.

Software architects should be master builders

28

To add some additional detail:

The master mason, then, designed the structural, aesthetic and symbolic features
of what was to be built; organised the logistics that supported the works; and,
moreover, prioritised and decided the order of the work.

Ivory towers?
If this is starting to sound familiar, wait until you hear how the teams used to work:
Every lesser mason followed the directions set by the master and all decisions
with regard to major structural, or aesthetic, problems were his domain.
Its certainly easy to see the parallels here in the way that many software teams have been
run traditionally, and its not surprising that many agile software development teams aspire
to adopt a different approach. Instead of a single dedicated technical leader that stays away
from the detail, many modern software development teams attempt to share the role between
a number of people. Of course, one of the key reasons that many architects stay away from
the detail is because they simply dont have the time. This typically leads to a situation where
the architect becomes removed from the real-world day-to-day reality of the team and slowly
becomes detached from them. It turns out that the master masons suffered from this problem
too:
If, as seems likely, this multiplicity of tasks was normal it is hardly surprising
that master masons took little part in the physical work (even had their status
permitted it). Testimony of this supposition is supplied by a sermon given in
1261 by Nicholas de Biard railing against the apparent sloth of the master mason
who ordains by word alone.
This quote from Agile Coaching (by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley) highlights a common
consequence of this in the software industry:
If you know how to program, its often tempting to make suggestions about
how developers should write the code. Be careful, because you may be wasting
your time - developers are likely to ignore your coding experience if youre not
programming on the project. They may also think that youre overstepping your
role and interfering in how they do their job, so give such advice sparingly.

Software architects should be master builders

29

To cap this off, many people see the software architecture role as an elevated position/rank
within their organisation, which further exaggerates the disconnect between developer and
architect. It appears that the same is true of master masons too:
In order to avoid the sort of struggle late Renaissance artists had to be recognised
as more than mere artisans it would seem that master masons perpetuated a
myth (as I see it) of being the descendants of noblemen. Further to this, by
shrouding their knowledge with secrecy they created a mystique that separated
them from other less arcane or noble professions.

Divergence of the master builder role

Much of this points to the idea that master builders didnt have much time for building, even
though they possessed the skills to do so. To bring this back to the software industry; should
software architects write code? My short answer is ideally, yes and the longer answer can
be found here. Why? Because technology isnt an implementation detail and you need to
understand the trade-offs of the decisions you are making.
So why dont modern building architects help with the actual process of hands-on building?
To answer this, we need to look how the role has evolved over the years:
Throughout ancient and medieval history, most architectural design and construction was carried out by artisanssuch as stone masons and carpenters,
rising to the role of master builder. Until modern times there was no clear
distinction between architect and engineer. In Europe, the titles architect and
engineer were primarily geographical variations that referred to the same
person, often used interchangeably.
The Wikipedia page for structural engineering provides further information:
Structural engineering has existed since humans first started to construct their
own structures. It became a more defined and formalised profession with
the emergence of the architecture profession as distinct from the engineering
profession during the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. Until then,
the architect and the structural engineer were usually one and the same the master builder. Only with the development of specialised knowledge of
structural theories that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries did
the professional structural engineer come into existence.

Software architects should be master builders

30

In essence, the traditional architect role has diverged into two roles. One is the structural
engineer, who ensures that the building doesnt fall over. And the other is the architect,
who interacts with the client to gather their requirements and design the building from an
aesthetic perspective. Martin Fowlers bliki has a page that talks about the purpose of and
difference between the roles.
A software architect is seen as a chief designer, someone who pulls together
everything on the project. But this is not what a building architect does. A
building architect concentrates on the interaction with client who wants the
building. He focuses his mind on issues that matter to the client, such as the
building layout and appearance. But theres more to a building than that.
Building is now seen as an engineering discipline because of the huge body of knowledge
behind it, which includes the laws of physics and being able to model/predict how materials
will behave when they are used to construct buildings. By comparison, the software
development industry is still relatively young and moves at an alarmingly fast pace. Buildings
today are mostly built using the same materials as they were hundreds of years ago, but it
seems like were inventing a new technology every twenty minutes. We live in the era of
Internet time. Until our industry reaches the point where software can be built in the same
way as a predictive engineering project, its crucial that somebody on the team keeps up to
date with technology and is able to make the right decisions about how to design software. In
other words, software architects still need to play the role of structural engineer and architect.

Achieving the role

The final thing to briefly look at is how people achieved the role of master mason. From the
Wikipedia page about stonemasonry:
Medieval stonemasons skills were in high demand, and members of the guild,
gave rise to three classes of stonemasons: apprentices, journeymen, and master
masons. Apprentices were indentured to their masters as the price for their
training, journeymen had a higher level of skill and could go on journeys to
assist their masters, and master masons were considered freemen who could
travel as they wished to work on the projects of the patrons.
This mirrors my own personal experience of moving into a software architecture role. It
was an evolutionary process. Like many people, I started my career writing code under

Software architects should be master builders

31

the supervision of somebody else and gradually, as I gained more experience, started to
take on larger and larger design tasks. Unlike the medieval building industry though, the
software development industry lacks an explicit way for people to progress from being junior
developers through to software architects. We dont have a common apprenticeship model.

Architects need to work with the teams

Herein lies the big problem for many organisations though - there arent enough architects
to go around. Although the master masons may not have had much time to work with stone
themselves, they did work with the teams. I often get asked questions from software architects
who, as a part of their role, are expected to provide assistance to a number of different teams.
Clearly its unrealistic to contribute to the hands-on elements of the software delivery if you
are working with a number of different teams. Youre just not going to have the time to write
any code.
Performing a software architecture role across a number of teams is not an effective way to
work though. Typically this situation occurs when there is a centralised group of architects
(e.g. in an Enterprise Architecture Group) who are treated as shared resources. From what
Ive read, the master masons were dedicated to a single building site at any one point in
time and this is exactly the approach that we should adopt within our software development
teams. If you think that this isnt possible, just take a look at how the medieval building
industry solved the problem:
A mason would have an apprentice working for him. When the mason moved
on to a new job, the apprentice would move with him. When a mason felt that
his apprentice had learned enough about the trade, he would be examined at a
Masons Lodge.
Again, it comes back to the strong apprenticeship model in place and this is exactly why
coaching and mentoring should be a part of the modern software architecture role. We need
to grow the software architects of tomorrow and every software development team needs
their own master builder.

10. From developer to architect

The line between software development and software architecture is a tricky one. Some
people will tell you that it doesnt exist and that architecture is simply an extension of
the design process undertaken by developers. Others will make out its a massive gaping
chasm that can only be crossed by lofty developers who believe you must always abstract
your abstractions and not get bogged down by those pesky implementation details. As
always, theres a pragmatic balance somewhere in the middle, but it does raise the interesting
question of how you move from one to the other.
Some of the key factors that are often used to differentiate software architecture from
software design include an increase in scale, an increase in the level of abstraction and an
increase in the significance of making the right design decisions. Software architecture is all
about having a holistic view and seeing the big picture to understand how the software
system works as a whole.
While this may help to differentiate software design and architecture, it doesnt necessarily
help in understanding how a software developer moves into a software architecture role.
Furthermore, it also doesnt help in identifying who will make a good software architect and
how you go about finding them if youre hiring.

Experience is a good gauge but you need to look deeper

There are a number of different qualities that you need to look for in a software architect and
their past experience is often a good gauge of their ability to undertake the role. Since the
role of a software architect is varied though, you need to look deeper to understand the level
of involvement, influence, leadership and responsibility that has been demonstrated across a
number of different areas. In conjunction with my definition of the software architecture role,
each of the parts can and should be evaluated independently. After all, the software design
process seems fairly straightforward. All you have to do is figure out what the requirements
are and design a system that satisfies them. But in reality its not that simple and the software
architecture role undertaken by somebody can vary wildly. For example:
1. Architectural drivers: capturing and challenging a set of complex non-functional
requirements versus simply assuming their existence.

From developer to architect

33

2. Designing software: designing a software system from scratch versus extending an

existing one.
3. Technical risks: proving that your architecture will work versus hoping for the best.
4. Architecture evolution: being continually engaged and evolving your architecture
versus choosing to hand it off to an implementation team.
5. Coding: being involved in the hands-on elements of the delivery versus watching from
the sidelines.
6. Quality assurance: assuring quality and selecting standards versus being reviewed
against them or doing nothing.
Much of this comes down to the difference between taking responsibility for a solution versus
assuming that its not your problem.

The line is blurred

Regardless of whether you view the line between software development and architecture as a
mythical one or a gaping chasm, peoples level of experience across the software architecture
role varies considerably. Furthermore, the line between software development and software
architecture is blurred somewhat. Most developers dont wake up on a Monday morning
and declare themselves to be a software architect. I certainly didnt and my route into
software architecture was very much an evolutionary process. Having said that, theres a
high probability that many software developers are already undertaking parts of the software
architecture role, irrespective of their job title.

Crossing the line is our responsibility

Theres a big difference between contributing to the architecture of a software system and
being responsible for it; with a continuum of skills, knowledge and experience needed across
the different areas that make up the software architecture role. Crossing the line between
software developer and software architect is up to us. As individuals we need to understand
the level of our own experience and where we need to focus our efforts to increase it.

11. Broadening the T

Despite what you may hear some people say, software architecture is not a post-technical
or non-technical career. Drawing a handful of boxes, lines and clouds on a whiteboard and
handing that off as a software design is not what the role is all about.

Deep technology skills

T is for technology, and this is exactly what good software architects need to know about.
As software developers, we tend to have knowledge about things like programming language
syntax, APIs, frameworks, design patterns, automated unit testing and all of the other lowlevel technical stuff that we use on a daily basis. And this is the same basic knowledge that
software architects need too. Why? Because people in the software architecture role need to
understand technology, basically so that they are able to honestly answer the following types
of questions:
Is this solution going to work?
Is that how we are going to build it?
However, given the learning curve associated with being productive in different programming languages, its common for software professionals to only know one or two technologies
really well. Eventually these people get known for being a Java developer or an Oracle
developer, for example. Ive been there and done that myself. Ive also seen it happen in
many other organisations. If youve ever wondered why there are so many religious battles
related to programming languages, you need look no further for how many of these start.
Although we may strive to be open-minded, its easy to get siloed into a single technology
stack. While theres nothing particularly wrong with this, you have to be careful that you do
keep an open mind. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything will look
like a nail. Gaining experience is an essential part of the learning journey, but that same
experience shouldnt constrain you. As an example, you dont need a relational database
for every software system, but often this is the first thing that gets drawn when a team is
sketching out a candidate software architecture.

Broadening the T

35

Breadth of knowledge
And that brings me onto why its important for software architects to have a breadth of
technology knowledge too. Sure, they may be specialists in Java or Oracle, but the role
demands more. For example, the people in the software architecture role should be able to
answer the following types of questions too:
Is the technology that weve chosen the most appropriate given the other options
available?
What are the other options for the design and build of this system?
Is there a common architectural pattern that we should be using?
Do we understand the trade-offs of the decisions that were making?
Have we catered for the desired quality attributes?
How can we prove that this architecture will work?

Software architects are generalising specialists

Most of the best software architects I know have come from a software development
background. This doesnt mean that they are the best coders on a team, but they are
able to switch between the low-level details and the big picture. They also have a deep
technical specialism backed-up with a breadth of knowledge that theyve gained from years
of experience in building software. But they cant (and dont) always know everything. Plus
its rare to find a software system that only uses a single technology stack. Some examples
of systems with heterogeneous technology stacks that Ive seen during my career include:
A Microsoft .NET desktop client running against a number of Oracle databases.
A Microsoft ASP.NET website pulling data from an Oracle database via a collection of
Java EE web services.
iOS and Android mobile apps pulling data from RESTful services written in Java.
A micro-service style architecture, where various services were built using Microsoft
.NET or Ruby.
A Microsoft ASP.NET website pulling data from a Microsoft Dynamics CRM system.
A Microsoft SharePoint website pulling data from a collection of databases via
Microsoft .NET/Windows Communication Foundation services.
A Java EE web application integrating with SAP.

Broadening the T

36

etc
Although general design knowledge, techniques, patterns and approaches often apply to a
number of different technologies, not understanding how to apply them successfully at a
low-level of detail can cause issues. Does this mean that the software architect should be an
expert in all of the technologies that are in use on any give software system? No. Instead
collaboration is key. Find somebody that does understand the things you dont and work
with them closely. Nothing says that the software architecture role cant be shared, and often
appreciating the gaps in your own knowledge is the first step to creating a more collaborative
working environment. Pair programming has benefits, so why not pair architecting?

Software architecture is a technical career

Technology knowledge underpins the software architecture role, requiring a combination of
deep technology skills coupled with broader knowledge. If the people designing the software
and drawing the architecture diagrams cant answer the question of whether the architecture
will work, they are probably the wrong people to be doing that job. Software architecture is
most definitely a technical career but thats not the end of the story. Good soft skills are vital
too.

12. Soft skills

The majority of the discussion about the software architecture role in this book relates back
to having technical depth and breadth. But this is really only half the story. Since were
essentially talking about a leadership role, soft skills or people skills are vitally important
too.
Leadership: In its simplest form, leadership is the ability to create a shared vision and
to then take people on a journey to satisfy the common goal.
Communication: You can have the best ideas and vision in the world, but youre dead
in the water if youre unable to effectively communicate this to others. This means
people inside and outside of the software development team, using the language and
level of detail that is appropriate to the audience.
Influencing: This is a key leadership skill and can be done a number of ways,
from overt persuasion through to Neuro-Linguistic Programming or Jedi mind tricks.
Influencing people can also be done through compromise and negotiation. Individuals
may have their own ideas and agendas, which you need to deal with while keeping
everybody on-side and motivated to get the result that you need. Good influencing
requires good listening and exploring skills too.
Confidence: Confidence is important, underpinning effective leadership, influence
and communication. Confidence doesnt mean arrogance though.
Collaboration: The software architecture role shouldnt be done in isolation, and
collaboration (working with others) to come up with a better solution is a skill that is
worth practicing. This means listening, being open-minded and responsive to feedback.
Coaching: Not everybody will have experience in what youre trying to do and youll
need to coach people on their role, technologies, etc.
Mentoring: Mentoring is about facilitating somebodys learning rather than telling
them how to do something. As a leader you may be asked to mentor others on the
team.
Motivation: This is about keeping the team happy, up-beat and positive. The team also
needs to feel motivated to follow any vision that you create as a software architect.
You will face an uphill battle without the rest of the teams buy-in.
Facilitation: There will often be times where you need to step back and facilitate
discussions, particularly where there is conflict within the team. This requires exploration, objectivity and helping the team come up with a solution to build consensus.

Soft skills

38

Political: There are always politics at play in every organisation. My mantra is to steer
clear of getting involved as far as possible, but you should at least understand whats
going on around you so that you can make more informed decisions.
Responsibility: You cant necessarily blame the rest of the software development
team for failure and its important that you have a sense of responsibility. Its your
problem if your software architecture doesnt satisfy the business goals, deliver the
non-functional requirements or the technical quality is poor.
Delegation: Delegation is an important part of any leadership role and theres a fine
line between delegating everything and doing everything yourself. You should learn
to delegate where appropriate but remember that its not the responsibility youre
delegating.

Stay positive
As a software architect, which is a leadership role however you look at it, youre likely to be
an important role model for a number of people on the development team. The reason for
this? Many of the team are probably aspiring software architects themselves. Although this
is a flattering situation to be in, there are some major downsides if you take your eye off the
ball.
Whether youve recognised it or not, youre in a very influential position and the eyes of
the development team are likely to be watching your every move. For this reason alone, you
have the power to change the whole dynamic of the team, whether you like it or not. If youre
motivated, the development team is likely to be motivated. If youre enthusiastic about the
work, the rest of the team is likely to be enthusiastic about the work. If youre optimistic that
everything will pan out, the development team will be too.
You can almost think of this as a self-supporting loop of positive energy where your
enthusiasm drives the team, and their enthusiasm drives you. This is all fantastic but its
not hard to see the damage that can be caused by a slip-up on your behalf. Any degree of
lethargy, apathy or pessimism will rub onto your team quicker than you can say but well
be okay and youll start spiralling towards a vicious circle of negativity.
We dont often talk about the softer side of being a software architect but the soft skills
are sometimes more important than being technically strong. A happy team is a team that
delivers. As a leader, its your responsibility to keep the team positive and your role in the
overall team dynamics shouldnt be underplayed.

13. Software development is not a

relay sport
Software teams that are smaller and/or agile tend to be staffed with people who are generalising specialists; people that have a core specialism along with more general knowledge and
experience. In an ideal world, these cross-discipline team members would work together to
run and deliver a software project, undertaking everything from requirements capture and
architecture through to coding and deployment. Although many software teams strive to
be self-organising, in the real world they tend to be larger, more chaotic and staffed only
with specialists. Therefore, these teams typically need, and often do have, somebody in the
technical leadership role.

Solution Architects
There are a lot of people out there, particularly in larger organisations, calling themselves
solution architects or technical architects, who design software and document their
solutions before throwing them over the wall to a separate development team. With the
solution done, the architect will then move on to do the same somewhere else, often not
even taking a cursory glimpse at how the development team is progressing. When you throw
not invented here syndrome into the mix, theres often a tendency for that receiving team to
not take ownership of the solution and the architecture initially created becomes detached
from reality.
Ive met a number of such architects in the past and one particular interview I held epitomises
this approach to software development. After the usual tell me about your role and recent
projects conversation, it became clear to me that this particular architect (who worked
for one of the large blue chip consulting firms) would create and document a software
architecture for a project before moving on elsewhere to repeat the process. After telling
me that he had little or no involvement in the project after he handed over the solution, I
asked him how he knew that his software architecture would work. Puzzled by this question,
he eventually made the statement that this was an implementation detail. He confidently
viewed his software architecture as correct and it was the development teams problem if
they couldnt get it to work. In my view, this was an outrageous thing to say and it made

Software development is not a relay sport

40

him look like an ass during the interview. His approach was also AaaS Architecture as a
Service!

Somebody needs to own the big picture

The software architecture role is a generalising specialist role, and different to your typical
software developer. Its certainly about steering the ship at the start of a software project,
which includes things like managing the non-functional requirements and putting together
a software design that is sensitive to the context and environmental factors. But its also
about continuously steering the ship because your chosen path might need some adjustment
en-route. After all, agile approaches have shown us that we dont necessarily have (and need)
all of the information up front.
A successful software project requires the initial vision to be created, communicated and
potentially evolved throughout the entirety of the software development life cycle. For this
reason alone, it doesnt make sense for one person to create that vision and for another team
to (try to) deliver it. When this does happen, the set of initial design artefacts is essentially a
baton that gets passed between the architect and the development team. This is inefficient,
ineffective and exchange of a document means that much of the decision making context
associated with creating the vision is also lost. Lets hope that the development team never
needs to ask any questions about the design or its intent!
This problem goes away with truly self-organising teams, but most teams havent yet reached
this level of maturity. Somebody needs to take ownership of the big picture throughout the
delivery and they also need to take responsibility for ensuring that the software is delivered
successfully. Software development is not a relay sport and successful delivery is not an
implementation detail.

14. Software architecture introduces

control?
Software architecture introduces structure and vision into software projects but is it also
about introducing control? And if so, is control a good thing or a bad thing?

Provide guidance, strive for consistency

Many of the practices associated with software architecture are about the introduction of
guidance and consistency into software projects. If youve ever seen software systems where
a common problem or cross-cutting concern has been implemented in a number of different
ways, then youll appreciate why this is important. A couple of examples spring to mind;
Ive seen a software system with multiple object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks in a
single codebase and another where components across the stack were configured in a number
of different ways, ranging from the use of XML files on disk through to tables in a database.
Deployment and maintenance of both systems was challenging to say the least.
Guidance and consistency can only be realised by introducing a degree of control and
restraint, for example, to stop team members going off on tangents. You cant have people
writing database access code in your web pages if youve specifically designed a distributed
software system in order to satisfy some of your key non-functional requirements. Control
can also be about simply ensuring a clear and consistent structure for your codebase;
appropriately organising your code into packages, namespaces, components, layers, etc.

How much control do you need?

The real question to be answered here relates to the amount of control that needs to be
introduced. At one end of the scale you have the dictatorial approach where nobody can
make a decision for themselves versus the other end of the scale where nobody is getting any
guidance whatsoever. Ive seen both in software projects and Ive taken over chaotic projects
where everybody on the team was basically left to their own devices. The resulting codebase
was, unsurprisingly, a mess. Introducing control on this sort of project is really hard work
but it needs to be done if the team is to have any chance of delivering a coherent piece of
software that satisfies the original drivers.

Software architecture introduces control?

42

Control varies with culture

Ive also noticed that different countries and cultures place different values on control. Some
(e.g. the UK) value control and the restraint that it brings whereas others (e.g. Scandinavia)
value empowerment and motivation. As an example of what this means in the real world,
its the difference between having full control over all of the technologies used on a software
project (from the programming language right down to the choice of logging library) through
to being happy for anybody in the team make those decisions.

A lever, not a button

I like to think of control as being a control lever rather than something binary that is either
on or off. At one extreme you have the full-throttle dictatorial approach and at the other you
have something much more lightweight. You also have a range of control in between the
extremes allowing you to introduce as much control as is necessary. So how much control do
you introduce? Its a consulting style answer admittedly, but without knowing your context,
it depends on a number of things:

Are the team experienced?

Has the team worked together before?
How large is the team?
How large is the project?
Are the project requirements complex?
Are there complex non-functional requirements or constraints that need to be taken
into account?
What sort of discussions are happening on a daily basis?
Does the team or the resulting codebase seem chaotic already?
etc
My advice would be to start with some control and listen to the feedback in order to finetune it as you progress. If the team are asking lots of why? and how? questions, then
perhaps more guidance is needed. If it feels like the team are fighting against you all of the
time, perhaps youve pushed that lever too far. Theres no universally correct answer, but
some control is a good thing and its therefore worth spending a few minutes looking at how
much is right for your own team.

15. Mind the gap

Our industry has a love-hate relationship with the software architecture role, with many
organisations dismissing it because of their negative experience of architects who dictate
from ivory towers and arent engaged with the actual task of building working software.
This reputation is damaging the IT industry and inhibiting project success. Things need to
change.

Developers focus on the low-level detail

If youre working on a software development project at the moment, take a moment to look
around at the rest of the team. How is the team structured? Does everybody have a well
defined role and responsibilities? Whos looking after the big picture; things like performance,
scalability, availability, security and so on?
We all dream about working on a team where everybody is equally highly experienced and is
able to think about the software at all levels, from the code right through to the architectural
issues. Unfortunately the real world just isnt like that. Most of the teams that Ive worked
with are made up of people with different levels of experience, some of who are new to IT and
others who have been around the block a few times. As software developers, the code is our
main focus but what happens if you have a team that only focusses on this low-level detail?
Imagine a codebase where all of the latest programming language features are used, the code
is nicely decoupled and testing is completely automated. The codebase can be structured and
formatted to perfection but thats no use if the system has scalability issues when deployed
into a live environment.

Architects dictate from their ivory towers

The software architecture role is different to a developer role. Some people view it as a
step up from being a developer, and some view it as a step sideways. However you view
it, the architecture role is about looking after the big picture. Many teams do understand
the importance of software architecture but will bring in somebody with the prestigious
title of Architect only to stick them on a pedestal above the rest of the team. If anything,
this instantly isolates the architect by creating an exaggerated gap between them and the
development team they are supposed to be working with.

Mind the gap

44

Reducing the gap

Unfortunately, many software teams have this unnecessary gap between the development
team and the architect, particularly if the architect is seen to be dictating and laying down
commandments for the team to follow. This leads to several problems.
The development team doesnt respect the architect, regardless of whether the architects decisions are right or not.
The development team becomes demotivated.
Important decisions fall between the gap because responsibilities arent well defined.
The project eventually suffers because nobody is looking after the big picture.
Fortunately, there are some simple ways to address this problem, from both sides. Software
development is a team activity after all.

If youre a software architect:

Be inclusive and collaborate: Get the development team involved in the software
architecture process to help them understand the big picture and buy-in to the
decisions you are making. This can be helped by ensuring that everybody understands
the rationale and intent behind the decisions.
Get hands-on: If possible, get involved with some of the day-to-day development
activities on the project to improve your understanding of how the architecture is
being delivered. Depending on your role and team size, this might not be possible,
so look at other ways of retaining some low-level understanding of whats going on
such as assisting with design and code reviews. Having an understanding of how the
software works at a low-level will give you a better insight into how the development
team are feeling about the architecture (e.g. whether they are ignoring it!) and it will
provide you with valuable information that you can use to better shape/influence your
architecture. If the developers are experiencing pain, you need to feel it too.

If youre a software developer:

Understand the big picture: Taking some time out to understand the big picture will
help you understand the context in which the architectural decisions are being made
and enhance your understanding of the system as a whole.

Mind the gap

45

Challenge architectural decisions: With an understanding of the big picture, you

now have the opportunity to challenge the architectural decisions being made. Architecture should be a collaborative process and not dictated by people that arent engaged
in the project day-to-day. If you see something that you dont understand or dont like,
challenge it.
Ask to be involved: Many projects have an architect who is responsible for the
architecture and its this person who usually undertakes all of the architecture work.
If youre a developer and you want to get more involved, just ask. You might be doing
the architect a favour!

A collaborative approach to software architecture

What Ive talked about here is easily applicable to small/medium project teams, but things
do start to get complicated with larger teams. By implication, a larger team means a bigger
project, and a bigger project means a bigger big picture. Whatever the size of project
though, ensuring that the big picture isnt neglected is crucial for success and this typically
falls squarely on the architects shoulders. However, most software teams can benefit from
reducing the unnecessary gap between developers and architects, with the gap itself being
reducible from both sides. Developers can increase their architectural awareness, while
architects can improve their collaboration with the rest of the team. Make sure that you
mind the gap and others may follow.

16. Where are the software architects

of tomorrow?
Agile and software craftsmanship are two great examples of how were striving to improve
and push the software industry forward. We spend a lot of time talking about writing
code, automated testing, automated deployment, tools, technologies and all of the associated
processes. And that makes a lot of sense because the end-goal here is delivering benefit to
people through software, and working software is key. But we shouldnt forget that there
are some other aspects of the software development process that few people genuinely have
experience with. Think about how you would answer the following questions.
1. When did you last code?
Earlier today, Im a software developer so its part of the job.
2. When did you last refactor?
Im always looking to make my code the best I can, and that includes refactoring
if necessary. Extract method, rename, pull up, push down I know all that stuff.
3. When did you last test your code?
We test continuously by writing automated tests either before, during or after
we write any production code. We use a mix of unit, integration and acceptance
testing.
4. When did you last design something?
I do it all the time, its a part of my job as a software developer. I need to think
about how something will work before coding it, whether thats by sketching out
a diagram or using TDD.
5. When did you last design a software system from scratch? I mean, take a set of vague
requirements and genuinely create something from nothing?
Well, theres not much opportunity on my current project, but I have an open
source project that I work on in my spare time. Its only for my own use though.
6. When did you last design a software system from scratch that would be implemented
by a team of people.
Umm, thats not something I get to do.
Lets face it, most software developers dont get to take a blank sheet of paper and design
software from scratch all that frequently, regardless of whether that design is up front or
evolutionary and whether its a solo or collaborative exercise.

Where are the software architects of tomorrow?

47

Coaching, mentoring and apprenticeships

Coaching and mentoring is an overlooked activity on most software development projects,
with many team members not getting the support that they need. While technical leadership
is about guiding the project as a whole, there are times when individuals need assistance.
In addition to this, coaching and mentoring provides a way to enhance peoples skills and
to help them improve their own careers. Sometimes this assistance is of a technical nature,
and sometimes its more about the softer skills. From a technical perspective though, why
shouldnt the people undertaking the software architecture role help out with the coaching
and mentoring? Most architects that I know have got to where they are because they have
a great deal of experience in one or more technical areas. If this is the case, why shouldnt
those architects share some of their experience to help others out? An apprenticeship model
is exactly how the master builders of times past kept their craft alive.

Were losing our technical mentors

The sad thing about our industry is that many developers are being forced into non-technical
management positions in order to progress their careers up the corporate ladder. Ironically,
its often the best and most senior technical people who are forced away, robbing software
teams of their most valued technical leads, architects and mentors. Filling this gap tomorrow
are the developers of today.

Software teams need downtime

Many teams have already lost their most senior technical people, adding more work to
the remainder of the team who are already struggling to balance all of the usual project
constraints along with the pressures introduced by whatever is currently fashionable in the
IT industry agile, craftsmanship, cloud, rich Internet UIs, functional programming, etc.
Many teams appreciate that they should be striving for improvement, but lack the time or
the incentive to do it.
To improve, software teams need some time away from the daily grind to reflect, but they
also need to retain a focus on all aspects of the software development process. Its really
easy to get caught up in the hype of the industry, but its worth asking whether this is more
important than ensuring you have a good pragmatic grounding.
Experience of coding is easy to pick up and there are plenty of ways to practice this skill.
Designing something from scratch that will be implemented by a team isnt something

Where are the software architects of tomorrow?

48

that you find many teams teaching or practicing though. With many technical mentors
disappearing thanks to the typical corporate career ladder, where do developers gain this
experience? Where are the software architects of tomorrow going to come from?

17. Everybody is an architect, except

when theyre not
Many software teams strive to be agile and self-organising yet its not immediately obvious
how the software architecture role fits into this description of modern software development
teams.

Everybody is an architect
In Extreme Programming Annealed, Glenn Vanderburg discusses the level at which the
Extreme Programming practices work, where he highlights the link between architecture
and collective ownership. When we talk about collective ownership, were usually referring
to collectively owning the code so that anybody on the team is empowered to make changes.
In order for this to work, theres an implication that everybody on the team has at least some
basic understanding of the big picture. Think about your current project; could you jump
into any part of the codebase and understand what was going on?
Imagine if you did have a team of experienced software developers that were all able to
switch in and out of the big picture. A team of genuinely hands-on architects. That team
would be amazing and all of the elements you usually associate with software architecture
(non-functional requirements, constraints, etc) would all get dealt with and nothing would
slip through the gaps. From a technical perspective, this is a self-organising team.

Except when theyre not

My big problem with the self-organising team idea is that we talk about it a lot in industry, yet
I rarely see it in practice. This could be a side-effect of working in a consulting environment
because my team always changes from project to project plus I dont tend to spend more than
a few months with any particular customer. Or, as I suspect, true self-organising teams are
very few and far between. Striving to be self-organising is admirable but, for many software
teams, this is like running before you can walk.
In Notes to a software team leader, Roy Osherove describes his concept of Elastic
Leadership where the leadership style needs to vary in relation to the maturity of the team.

Everybody is an architect, except when theyre not

50

Roy categorises the maturity of teams using a simple model, with each level requiring a
different style of leadership.
1. Survival model (chaos): requires a more direct, command and control leadership style.
2. Learning: requires a coaching leadership style.
3. Self-organising: requires facilitation to ensure the balance remains intact.
As I said, a team where everybody is an experienced software developer and architect would
be amazing but this isnt something Ive seen happen. Most projects dont have anybody on
the team with experience of the big picture stuff and this is evidenced by codebases that
dont make sense (big balls of mud), designs that are unclear, systems that are slow and so on.
This type of situation is the one I see the most and, from a technical perspective, I recommend
that one person on the team takes responsibility for the software architecture role.
Roy uses the ScrumMaster role as an example. Teams in the initial stages of their maturity
will benefit from a single person undertaking the ScrumMaster role to help drive them in
the right direction. Self-organising teams, on the other hand, dont need to be told what to
do. The clue is in the name; they are self-organising by definition and can take the role upon
themselves. I would say that the same is true of the software architecture, and therefore
technical leadership, role.

Does agile need architecture?

Unfortunately, many teams view the big picture technical skills as an unnecessary evil
rather than an essential complement, probably because theyve been burnt by big design up
front in the past. Some are also so focussed on the desire to be agile that other aspects of
the software development process get neglected. Chaos rather than self-organisation ensues
yet such teams challenge the need for a more direct leadership approach. After all, theyre
striving to be agile and having a single point of responsibility for the technical aspects of the
project conflicts with their view of what an agile team should look like. This conflict tends
to cause people to think that agile and architecture are opposing forces - you can have one or
the other but not both. Its not architecture thats the opposing force though, its big design
up front.
Agile software projects still need architecture because all those tricky concerns around
complex non-functional requirements and constraints dont go away. Its just the execution
of the architecture role that differs.

Everybody is an architect, except when theyre not

51

With collective code ownership, everybody needs to be able to work at the architecture level
and so everybody is an architect to some degree. Teams that arent at the self-organising
stage will struggle if they try to run too fast though. Despite peoples aspirations to be agile,
collective code ownership and a distribution of the architecture role are likely to hinder
chaotic teams rather than help them. Chaotic teams need a more direct leadership approach
and they will benefit from a single point of responsibility for the technical aspects of the
software project. In other words, they will benefit from a single person looking after the
software architecture role. Ideally this person will coach others so that they too can help
with this role.
One software architect or many? Single point of responsibility or shared amongst the team?
Agile or not, the software architecture role exists. Only the context will tell you the right
answer.

18. Software architecture as a

consultant
Most of my career has been spent working for IT consulting companies, where Ive
either built software systems for our customers under an outsourcing arrangement or with
our customers as a part of a mixed customer-supplier team (this is often called bodyshopping). Although undertaking the software architecture role within a consulting context
is fundamentally the same as undertaking the role in any other context, there are some
potential gotchas to be aware of.

Domain knowledge
A good working knowledge of the business domain is essential. If youre working within
the finance industry, you should know something about how your particular part of the
finance industry works (e.g. funds management, investment banking, retail banking, etc).
Most business domains are more complex than they really should be and even seemingly
simple domains can surprise you. I remember the first time that I saw the ferry and hotel
domains, which surprisingly arent simply about booking seats on boats or rooms in hotels.
Having an appreciation of the business domain helps you to better understand the goals and
create successful software products.
And this raises an interesting question. A deep knowledge of the business domain only comes
from working within that domain for an extended period of time but most consultants move
between different customers, teams and business domains on a regular basis. Is it therefore
fair to expect consultants to possess deep domain knowledge?
There are a couple of approaches that Ive seen people take. The first is to restrict yourself
to working within a single business domain as a consultant so that you do gain a deep
working knowledge of the business domain. As an example, a number of the IT consulting
organisations that Ive worked for have specialised in the investment banking industry, with
consultants moving from bank to bank within that industry. This is certainly an effective way
to ensure that consultants do understand the business domain, but its not an approach that
I particularly like. Some of the consultants who Ive worked with in the past have actually
taken offence when offered a consulting role outside of investment banking. These people

Software architecture as a consultant

53

usually saw their deep business domain knowledge as a key differentiator or unique selling
point when compared to other consultants.
A look at my bookshelf will reveal that my interests lie far more with technology than any
business domain. If I wanted to work for a bank, Id work for a bank rather than a consulting
organisation. As a result, Im happy to regularly switch between business domains and this
provides a degree of variety that you cant necessarily get from working in a single domain. I
also find it interesting to see how other industries solve similar problems, and this itself leads
to a number of opportunities for the cross-pollination of ideas. The downside, of course, is
that my domain knowledge of any particular domain isnt as deep as somebody who works
full-time in that business domain.
To prevent this being an issue, I believe that theres a skill in being able to understand enough
about a new business domain to become proficient quickly. And thats really my approach.
If youre a undertaking the software architecture role on a consulting basis, you need razor
sharp analysis skills to understand the key parts of the business domain without getting
trapped in a cycle of analysis paralysis.

Authority
The degree of control that the software architecture role needs to introduce depends on the
type of software development team that you work with. Often the team can present another
set of challenges though, especially if youre working as a consultant software architect with
a team of your customers in-house developers.
If youre responsible for the software architecture and technical delivery of a software system,
you must have the authority to make decisions. If you have the responsibility but not the
authority, and are therefore continually seeking permission to make decisions, you could be
in for a bumpy ride.
The software architecture role is about technical leadership and part of this means that you
need to get the whole team heading in the same direction. Dictating instructions to a team
of software developers isnt likely to be very effective if youre not their immediate line
manager, which is often the case if youre supplementing a customer team. This is where the
soft skills come into play, particularly those related to building relationships, creating trust
and motivating the team. Ive found that being a hands-on, coding architect goes a long way
to getting a successful outcome too.

19. Questions
1. Whats the difference between the software architecture and software developer roles?
2. What does the software architecture role entail? Is this definition based upon your
current or ideal team? If its the latter, what can be done to change your team?
3. Why is it important for anybody undertaking the software architecture role to
understand the technologies that they are using? Would you hire a software architect
who didnt understand technology?
4. If youre the software architect on your project, how much coding are you doing? Is
this too much or too little?
5. If, as a software architect, youre unable to code, how else can you stay engaged in the
low-level aspects of the project. And how else can you keep your skills up to date?
6. Why is having a breadth and depth of technical knowledge as important?
7. Do you think you have all of the required soft skills to undertake the software
architecture role? If not, which would you improve, why and how?
8. Does your current software project have enough guidance and control from a software
architecture perspective? Does it have too much?
9. Why is collaboration an important part of the software architecture role? Does your
team do enough? If not, why?
10. Is there enough coaching and mentoring happening on your team? Are you providing
or receiving it?
11. How does the software architecture role fit into agile projects and self-organising
teams?
12. What pitfalls have you fallen into as somebody new to the software architecture role?
13. Is there a well-defined terms of reference for the software architecture in your team
or organisation? If so, does everybody understand it? If not, is there value in creating
one to make an architects role and responsibilities explicit?

III Designing software

This part of the book is about the overall process of designing software, specifically looking
at the things that you should really think about before coding.

20. Architectural drivers

Regardless of the process that you follow (traditional and plan-driven vs lightweight and
adaptive), theres a set of common things that really drive, influence and shape the resulting
software architecture.

1. Functional requirements
In order to design software, you need to know something about the goals that it needs to
satisfy. If this sounds obvious, its because it is. Having said that, I have seen teams designing
software (and even building it) without a high-level understanding of the features that the
software should provide to the end-users. Some might call this being agile, but I call it foolish.
Even a rough, short list of features or user stories (e.g. a Scrum product backlog) is essential.
Requirements drive architecture.

2. Quality Attributes
Quality attributes are represented by the non-functional requirements and reflect levels of
service such as performance, scalability, availability, security, etc. These are mostly technical
in nature and can have a huge influence over the resulting architecture, particularly if
youre building high performance systems or you have desires to operate at Google scale.
The technical solutions to implementing non-functional requirements are usually crosscutting and therefore need to be baked into the foundations of the system youre building.
Retrofitting high performance, scalability, security, availability, etc into an existing codebase
is usually incredibly difficult and time-consuming.

3. Constraints
We live in the real world and the real world has constraints. For example, the organisation
that you work for probably has a raft of constraints detailing what you can and cant do with
respect to technology choice, deployment platform, etc.

Architectural drivers

57

4. Principles
Where constraints are typically imposed upon you, principles are the things that you want to
adopt in order to introduce consistency and clarity into the resulting codebase. These may be
development principles (e.g. code conventions, use of automated testing, etc) or architecture
principles (e.g. layering strategies, architecture patterns, etc).

Understand their influence

Understanding the requirements, constraints and principles at a high-level is essential
whenever you start working on a new software system or extend one that exists already.
Why? Put simply, this is the basic level of knowledge that you need in order to start making
design choices.
First of all, understanding these things can help in reducing the number of options that
are open to you, particularly if you find that the drivers include complex non-functional
requirements or major constraints such as restrictions over the deployment platform. In the
words of T.S.Eliot:
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its
utmost - and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely
to sprawl.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, its about making informed design decisions given
your particular set of goals and context. If you started designing a solution to the financial
risk system without understanding the requirements related to performance (e.g. calculation
complexity), scalability (e.g. data volumes), security and audit, you could potentially design
a solution that doesnt meet the goals.
Software architecture is about the significant design decisions, where significance is measured by cost of change. A high-level understanding of the requirements, constraints and
principles is a starting point for those significant decisions that will ultimately shape the
resulting software architecture. Understanding them early will help to avoid costly rework
in the future.

21. Quality Attributes (non-functional

requirements)
When youre gathering requirements, people will happily give you a wish-list of what
they want a software system to do and there are well established ways of capturing this
information as user stories, use cases, traditional requirements specifications, acceptance
criteria and so on. What about those pesky non-functional requirements though?
Non-functional requirements are often thought of as the -ilities and are primarily about
quality of service. Alternative, arguably better yet less commonly used names for nonfunctional requirements include system characteristics or quality attributes. A nonexhaustive list of the common quality attributes is as follows.

Performance
Performance is about how fast something is, usually in terms of response time or latency.
Response time: the time it takes between a request being sent and a response being
received, such as a user clicking a hyperlink on a web page or a button on a desktop
application.
Latency: the time it takes for a message to move through your system, from point A
to point B.
Even if youre not building high performance software systems, performance is applicable
to pretty much every software system that youll ever build, regardless of whether they are
web applications, desktop applications, service-oriented architectures, messaging systems,
etc. If youve ever been told that your software is too slow by your users, youll appreciate
why some notion of performance is important.

Scalability
Scalability is basically about the ability for your software to deal with more users, requests,
data, messages, etc. Scalability is inherently about concurrency and therefore dealing with
more stuff in the same period of time (e.g. requests per second).

Quality Attributes (non-functional requirements)

59

Availability
Availability is about the degree to which your software is operational and, for example,
available to service requests. Youll usually see availability measured or referred to in terms
of nines, such as 99.99% (four nines) or 99.999% (five nines). These numbers refer to the
uptime in terms of a percentage. The flip side of this coin is the amount of downtime that
can be tolerated. An uptime of 99.9% (three nines) provides you with a downtime window
of just over 1 minute per day for scheduled maintenance, upgrades and unexpected failure.

Security
Security covers everything from authentication and authorisation through to the confidentiality of data in transit and storage. As with performance, theres a high probability that
security is important to you at some level. Security should be considered for even the most
basic of web applications that are deployed onto the Internet. The Open Web Application
Security Project (OWASP) is a great starting point for learning about security.

Disaster Recovery
What would happen if you lost a hard disk, server or data centre that your software was
running on? This is what disaster recovery is all about. If your software system is mission
critical, youll often hear people talking about business continuity processes too, which state
what should happen in the event of a disaster in order to retain continued operation.

Accessibility
Accessibility usually refers to things like the W3C accessibility standards, which talk about
how your software is accessible to people with disabilities such as visual impairments.

Monitoring
Some organisations have specific requirements related to how software systems should be
monitored to ensure that they are running and able to service requests. This could include
integrating your software with platform specific monitoring capabilities (e.g. JMX on the
Java platform) or sending alerts to a centralised monitoring dashboard (e.g. via SNMP) in the
event of a failure.

Quality Attributes (non-functional requirements)

60

Management
Monitoring typically provides a read-only view of a software system and sometimes there
will be runtime management requirements too. For example, it might be necessary to expose
functionality that will allow operational staff to modify the runtime topology of a system,
modify configuration elements, refresh read-only caches, etc.

Audit
Theres often a need to keep a log of events (i.e. an audit log) that led to a change in data or
behaviour of a software system, particularly where money is involved. Typically such logs
need to capture information related to who made the change, when the change was made
and why the change was made. Often there is a need retain the change itself too (i.e. before
and after values).

Flexibility
Flexibility is a somewhat overused and vague term referring to the flexibility of your
software to perform more than a single task, or to do that single task in a number of different
ways. A good example of a flexibility requirement would be the ability for non-technical
people to modify the business rules used within the software.

Extensibility
Extensibility is also overused and vague, but it relates to the ability to extend the software to
do something it doesnt do now, perhaps using plugins and APIs. Some off-the-shelf products
(e.g. Microsoft Dynamics CRM) allow non-technical end-users to extend the data stored and
change how other users interact with that data.

Maintainability
Maintainability is often cited as a requirement but what does this actually mean? As software
developers we usually strive to build maintainable software but its worth thinking about
who will be maintaining the codebase in the future. Maintainability is hard to quantify, so
Id rather think about the architecture and development principles that well be following
instead because they are drivers for writing maintainable code.

Quality Attributes (non-functional requirements)

61

Legal, Regulatory and Compliance

Some industries are strictly governed by local laws or regulatory bodies, and this can lead
to additional requirements related to things like data retention or audit logs. As an example,
most finance organisations (investment banks, retail banks, trust companies, etc) must adhere
to a number of regulations (e.g. anti-money laundering) in order to retain their ability to
operate in the market.

Internationalisation (i18n)
Many software systems, particularly those deployed on the Internet, are no longer delivered
in a single language. Internationalisation refers to the ability to have user-facing elements of
the software delivered in multiple languages. This is seemingly simple until you try to retrofit
it to an existing piece of software and realise that some languages are written right-to-left.

Localisation (L10n)
Related to internationalisation is localisation, which is about presenting things like numbers,
currencies, dates, etc in the conventions that make sense to the culture of the end-user.
Sometimes internationalisation and localisation are bundled up together under the heading
of globalisation.

Which are important to you?

There are many quality attributes that we could specify for our software systems but they
dont all have equal weighting. Some are more applicable than others, depending on the
environment that you work in and the type of software systems that you build. A webbased system in the finance industry will likely have a different set of quality attributes to
an internal system used within the telco industry. My advice is to learn about the quality
attributes common within your domain and focus on those first when you start building a
new system or modifying an existing system.

22. Working with non-functional

requirements
Regardless of what you call them, youll often need to put some effort into getting the list of
non-functional requirements applicable to the software system that youre building.

Capture
Ive spent most of my 15+ year career in software development working in a consulting
environment where weve been asked to build software for our customers. In that time, I
can probably count on one hand the number of times a customer has explicitly given us
information about the non-functional requirements. Ive certainly received a large number
of requirements specifications or functional wish-lists, but rarely do these include any
information about performance, scalability, security, etc. In this case, you need to be proactive
and capture them yourself.
And herein lies the challenge. If you ask a business sponsor what level of system availability
they want, youll probably get an answer similar to 100%, 24 by 7 by 365 or yes please,
we want all of it.

Refine
Once youve started asking those tricky questions related to non-functional requirements, or
youve been fortunate enough to receive some information about them, youll probably need
to refine them.
On the few occasions that Ive received a functional requirements specification that did include some information about non-functional requirements, theyve usually been unhelpfully
vague. As an example, I once received a 125 page document from a potential customer that
detailed the requirements of the software system. The majority of the pages covered the
functional requirements in quite some detail and the last half page was reserved for the nonfunctional requirements. It said things like:
Performance: The system must be fast.

Working with non-functional requirements

63

Security: The system must be secure.

Availability: The system should be running 100% of the time.
Although this isnt very useful, at least we have a starting point for some discussions. Rather
than asking how much availability is needed and getting the inevitable 24 by 7 answer, you
can vary the questions depending on who you are talking to. For example:
How much system downtime can you tolerate?
What happens if the core of the system fails during our normal working hours of 9am
until 6pm?
What happens if the core of the system fails outside of normal working hours?
What youre trying to do is explore the requirements and get to the point where you
understand what the driving forces are. Why does the system need to be available? When we
talk about high security, what is it that were protecting? The goal here is to get to a specific
set of non-functional requirements, ideally that we can explicitly quantify. For example:
How many concurrent users should the system support on average? What about peak
times?
What response time is deemed as acceptable? Is this the same across all parts of the
system or just specific features?
How exactly do we need to secure the system? Do we really need to encrypt the data
or is restricted access sufficient?
If you can associate some quantity to the non-functional requirements (e.g. number of users,
data volumes, maximum response times, etc), you can can write some acceptance criteria
and objectively test them.

Challenge
With this in mind, we all know what response well get if we ask people whether they need
something. Theyll undoubtedly say, yes. This is why prioritising functional requirements,
user stories, etc is hard. Regardless of the prioritisation scale that you use (MoSCoW,
High/Medium/Low, etc), everything will end up as a must have on the first attempt at
prioritisation. You could create a super-must have category, but we know that everything
will just migrate there.

Working with non-functional requirements

64

A different approach is needed and presenting the cost implications can help focus the mind.
For example:
Architect: You need a system with 100% uptime. Building that requires lots of
redundancy to remove single points of failure and we would need two of everything
plus a lot of engineering work for all of the automatic failover. It will cost in the region
of $1,000,000. Alternatively we can build you something simpler, with the caveat that
some components would need to be monitored and restarted manually in the event of
a failure. This could cost in the region of $100,000. Which one do you need now?
Sponsor: Oh, if thats the case, I need the cheaper solution.
Anything is possible but everything has a trade-off. Explaining those trade-offs can help find
the best solution for the given context.

23. Constraints
Everything that we create as software developers lives in the real world, and the real
world has constraints. Like quality attributes, constraints can drive, shape and influence the
architecture of a software system. Theyre typically imposed upon you too, either by the
organisation that you work for or the environment that you work within. Constraints come
in many different shapes and sizes.

Time and budget constraints

Time and budget are probably the constraints that most software developers are familiar
with, often because theres not enough of either.

Technology constraints
There are a number of technology related constraints that we often come up against when
building software, particularly in large organisations:
Approved technology lists: Many large organisations have a list of the technologies
they permit software systems to be built with. The purpose of this list is to restrict
the number of different technologies that the organisation has to support, operate,
maintain and buy licenses for. Often there is a lengthy exceptions process that you
need to formally apply for if you want to use anything off list. Ive still seen teams
use Groovy or Scala on Java projects through the sneaky inclusion of an additional
JAR file though!
Existing systems and interoperability: Most organisations have existing systems that
you need to integrate your software with and youre often very limited in the number
of ways that you can achieve this. At other times, its those other systems that need
to integrate with whatever youre building. If this is the case, you may find that there
are organisation-wide constraints dictating the protocols and technologies you can
use for the integration points. A number of the investment banks Ive worked with
have had their own internal XML schemas for the exchange of trading information
between software systems. Concise and easy to use werent adjectives that we used
to describe them!

Constraints

66

Target deployment platform: The target deployment platform is usually one of

the major factors that influences the technology decisions you make when building
a greenfield software system. This includes embedded devices, the availability of
Microsoft Windows or Linux servers and the cloud. Yes, even this magical thing that
we call the cloud has constraints. As an example, every platform as a service (PaaS)
offering is different, and most have restrictions on what your software can and cant
do with things like local disk access. If you dont understand these constraints, theres a
huge danger that youll be left with some anxious rework when it comes to deployment
time.
Technology maturity: Some organisations are happy to take risks with bleeding edge
technology, embracing the risks that such advancements bring. Other organisations
are much more conservative in nature.
Open source: Likewise, some organisations still dont like using open source unless it
has a name such as IBM or Microsoft associated with it. I once worked on a project
for a high-street bank who refused to use open source, yet they were happy to use a
web server from a very well-known technology brand. The web server was the open
source Apache web server in disguise. Such organisations simply like having somebody
to shout at when things stop working. Confusion around open source licenses also
prevents some organisations from fully adopting open source too. You may have
witnessed this if youre ever tried to explain the difference between GPL and LGPL.
Vendor relationships: As with many things in life, its not what you know, its
who you know. Many partnerships are still forged on the golf course by vendors
who wine and dine Chief Technology Officers. If youve ever worked for a large
organisation and wondered why your team was forced to use something that was
obviously substandard, this might be the reason!
Past failures: Somewhere around the year 2000, I walked into a bank with a proposal
to build them a solution using Java RMI - a technology to allow remote method calls
across Java virtual machines. This was met with great resistance because the bank had
tried it before and it doesnt work. That was the end of that design and no amount
of discussion would change their mind. Java RMI was banned in this environment due
to a past failure. We ended up building a framework that would send serialized Java
objects over HTTP to a bunch of Java Servlets instead (a workaround to reinvent the
same wheel).
Internal intellectual property: When you need to find a library or framework to solve
some problem that youre facing, theres a high probability that theres an open source
or commercial product out there that suits your needs. This isnt good enough for some
people though and its not uncommon to find organisations with their own internal
logging libraries, persistence frameworks or messaging infrastructures that you must

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67

use, despite whether they actually work properly. I recently heard of one organisation
that built their own CORBA implementation.

People constraints
More often than not, the people around you will constrain the technologies and approaches
that are viable to use when developing software. For example:

How large is your development team?

What skills do they have?
How quickly can you scale your development team if needed?
Are you able to procure training, consulting and specialists if needed?
If youre handing over your software after delivery, will the maintenance team have
the same skills as your development team?

There will be an overhead if you ask a Java team to build a Microsoft .NET solution, so you
do need to take people into account whenever youre architecting a software system.

Organisational constraints
There are sometimes other constraints that youll need to be aware of, including:
Is the software system part of a tactical or strategic implementation? The answer to
this question can either add or remove constraints.
Organisational politics can sometimes prevent you from implementing the solution
that you really want to.

Are all constraints bad?

Constraints usually seem bad at the time that theyre being imposed, but theyre often
imposed for a good reason. For example, large organisations dont want to support and
maintain every technology under the sun, so they try to restrict what ends up in production.
On the one hand this can reduce creativity but, on the other, it takes away a large number
of potential options that would have been open to you otherwise. Software architecture is
about introducing constraints too. How many logging or persistence libraries do you really
want in a single codebase?

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Constraints can be prioritised

As a final note, its worth bearing in mind that constraints can be prioritised. Just like
functional requirements, some constraints are more important than others and you can often
use this to your advantage. The financial risk system that I use as a case study in my training
is based upon a real project that I worked on for a consulting company in London. One of
the investment banks approached us with their need for a financial risk system and the basic
premise behind this requirement was that, for regulatory reasons, the bank needed to have
a risk system in place so that they could enter a new market segment.
After a few pre-sales meetings and workshops, we had a relatively good idea of their
requirements plus the constraints that we needed to work within. One of the major
constraints was an approved list of technologies that included your typical heavyweight Java
EE stack. The other was a strict timescale constraint.
When we prepared our financial proposal, we basically said something along the lines of,
yes, were confident that we can deliver this system to meet the deadline, but well be using
some technologies that arent on your approved technology list, to accelerate the project.
Our proposal was accepted. In this situation, the timescale constraint was seen as much more
important than using only the technologies on the approved technology list and, in effect,
we prioritised one constraint over the other. Constraints are usually obstacles that you need
to work around, but sometimes you can trade the off against one another.

Listen to the constraints

Every software system will be subject to one or more constraints, and part of the software
architecture role is to seek these out, understand why they are being imposed and let them
help you shape the software architecture. Failing to do this may lead to some nasty surprises.

24. Principles
While constraints are imposed upon you, principles are the things that you want to adopt
in order to introduce standard approaches, and therefore consistency, into the way that you
build software. There are a number of common principles, some related to development and
others related to architecture.

Development principles
The principles that many software developers instantly think of relate to the way in which
software should be developed. For example:
Coding standards and conventions: We will adopt our in-house coding conventions
for [Java|C#|etc], which can be found on our corporate wiki.
Automated unit testing: Our goal is to achieve 80% code coverage for automated
unit tests across the core library, regardless of whether that code is developed using a
test-first or test-last approach.
Static analysis tools: All production and test code must pass the rules defined in
[Checkstyle|FxCop|etc] before being committed to source code control.
etc

Architecture principles
There are also some principles that relate to how the software should be structured. For
example:
Layering strategy: A layered architecture usually results in a software system that
has a high degree of flexibility because each layer is isolated from those around it.
For example, you may decompose your software system into a UI layer, a business
layer and a data access layer. Making the business layer completely independent
of the data access layer means that you can (typically) switch out the data access
implementation without affecting the business or UI layers. You can do this because the

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70

data access layer presents an abstraction to the business layer rather than the business
layer directly dealing with the data storage mechanism itself. If you want to structure
your software this way, you should ensure that everybody on the development team
understands the principle. No data access logic in the UI components or domain
objects is a concrete example of this principle in action.
Placement of business logic: Sometimes you want to ensure that business logic
always resides in a single place for reasons related to performance or maintainability.
In the case of Internet-connected mobile apps, you might want to ensure that as much
processing as possible happens on the server. Or if youre integrating with a legacy
back-end system that already contains a large amount of business logic, you might
want to ensure that nobody on the team attempts to duplicate it.
High cohesion, low coupling, SOLID, etc: There are many principles related to the
separation of concerns, focussing on building small highly cohesive building blocks
that dont require too many dependencies in order to do their job.
Stateless components: If youre building software that needs to be very scalable, then
designing components to be as stateless as possible is one way to ensure that you
can horizontally scale-out your system by replicating components to share the load. If
this is your scalability strategy, everybody needs to understand that they must build
components using the same pattern. This will help to avoid any nasty surprises and
scalability bottlenecks in the future.
Stored procedures: Stored procedures in relational databases are like Marmite - you
either love them or you hate them. There are advantages and disadvantages to using
or not using stored procedures, but I do prefer it when teams just pick one approach
for data access and stick to it. There are exceptions to every principle though.
Domain model - rich vs anaemic: Some teams like having a very rich domain model
in their code, building systems that are very object-oriented in nature. Others prefer a
more anaemic domain model where objects are simply data structures that are used by
coarse-grained components and services. Again, consistency of approach goes a long
way.
Use of the HTTP session: If youre building a website, you may or may not want to
use the HTTP session for storing temporary information between requests. This can
often depend on a number of things including what your scaling strategy is, where
session-backed objects are actually stored, what happens in the event of a server failure,
whether youre using sticky sessions, the overhead of session replication, etc. Again,
everybody on the development team should understand the desired approach and stick
to it.
Always consistent vs eventually consistent: Many teams have discovered that they
often need to make trade-offs in order to meet complex non-functional requirements.

Principles

71

For example, some teams trade-off data consistency for increased performance and/or
scalability. Provided that we do see all Facebook status updates, does it really matter
if we all dont see them immediately? Your context will dictate whether immediate or
delayed consistency is appropriate, but a consistent approach is important.

Beware of best practices

If you regularly build large enterprise software systems, you might consider most of the
principles that Ive just listed to be best practices. But beware. Even the most wellintentioned principles can sometimes have unintended negative side-effects. That complex
layering strategy you want to adopt to ensure a complete separation of concerns can suck up
a large percentage of your time if youre only building a quick, tactical solution. Principles
are usually introduced for a good reason, but that doesnt make them good all of the time.
The size and complexity of the software youre building, plus the constraints of your
environment, will help you decide which principles to adopt. Context, as always, is key.
Having an explicit list of principles can help to ensure that everybody on the team is working
in the same way but you do need to make sure these principles are helping rather then
hindering. Listening to the feedback from the team members will help you to decide whether
your principles are working or not.

25. Technology is not an

implementation detail
I regularly run training classes where I ask small groups of people to design a simple financial
risk system. In most cases, the resulting software architecture diagrams dont show any
technology decisions. Here are some of the typical responses to the question of why this
is the case:

the [risk system] solution is simple and can be built with any technology.
we dont want to force a solution on developers.
its an implementation detail.
we follow the last responsible moment principle.

I firmly believe that technology choices should be included on architecture diagrams but
theres a separate question here about why people dont feel comfortable making technology
decisions. Saying that it can be built with any technology doesnt mean that it should.
Heres why.

1. Do you have complex non-functional requirements?

True, most software systems can be built with pretty much any technology; be it Java, .NET,
Ruby, Python, PHP, etc. If you look at the data storage requirements for most software
systems, again, pretty much any relational database is likely to be able to do the job. Most
software systems are fairly undemanding in terms of the non-functional characteristics, so
any mainstream technology is likely to suffice.
But what happens if you do have complex non-functional requirements such as high
performance and/or scalability? Potentially things start to get a little trickier and you should
really understand whether your technology (and architecture) choices are going to work.
If you dont consider your non-functional requirements, theres a risk that your software
system wont satisfy its goals.

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73

2. Do you have constraints?

Many organisations have constraints related to the technologies that can be used and the
skills (people) that are available to build software. Some even dictate that software should be
bought and/or customised rather than built. Constraints can (and will) influence the software
architecture that you come up with. Challenge them by all means, but ignore them and you
risk delivering a software system that doesnt integrate with your organisations existing IT
environment.

3 Do you want consistency?

Imagine youre building a software system that stores data in a relational database. Does
it matter how individual members of the development team retrieve data from and store
data to the database when implementing features? Ive seen a Java system where there were
multiple data access techniques/frameworks adopted in the same codebase. And Ive seen a
SharePoint system where various components were configured in different ways. Sometimes
this happens because codebases evolve over time and approaches change, but often its simply
a side-effect of everybody on the development team having free rein to choose whatever
technology/framework/approach they are most familiar with.
People often ask me questions like, does it really matter which logging framework we
choose?. If you want everybody on the development team to use the same one, then yes,
it does. Some people are happy to allow anybody on the development team to download and
use any open source library that they want to. Others realise this can lead to problems if
left unchecked. Im not saying that you should stifle innovation, but you should really only
have a single logging, dependency injection or object-relational mapping framework in a
codebase.
A lack of a consistent approach can lead to a codebase that is hard to understand, maintain
and enhance. Increasing the number of unique moving parts can complicate the deployment,
operation and support too.

Deferral vs decoupling
Its worth briefly talking about deferring technology decisions and waiting until the last
responsible moment to make a decision. Lets imagine that youre designing a software system where there arent any particularly taxing non-functional requirements or constraints.

Technology is not an implementation detail

74

Does it matter which technologies you choose? And shouldnt a good architecture let you
change your mind at a later date anyway?
Many people will say, for example, that it really doesnt matter which relational database
you use, especially if you decouple the code that you write from a specific database implementation using an object-relational mapping layer such as Hibernate, Entity Framework or
ActiveRecord. If you dont have any significant non-functional requirements or constraints,
and you truly believe that all relational databases are equal, then it probably doesnt matter
which you use. So yes, you can decouple the database from your code and defer the
technology decision. But dont forget, while your choice of database is no longer a significant
decision, your choice of ORM is. You can decouple your code from your ORM by introducing
another abstraction layer, but again youve made a significant decision here in terms of the
structure of your software system.
Decoupling is a great approach for a number of reasons plus it enables technology decisions
to be deferred. Of course, this doesnt mean that you should defer decisions though, especially
for reasons related to the presence of non-functional requirements and constraints.

Every decision has trade-offs

Much of this comes back to the fact that every technology has its own set of advantages
and disadvantages, with different options not necessarily being swappable commodities. Relational database and web application frameworks are two typical examples of a technology
space that is often seen as commoditised. Likewise with many cloud providers, but even these
have their trade-offs related to deployment, monitoring, management, cost, persistent access
to disk and so on.
At the end of the day, every technology choice you make will have a trade-off whether
thats related to performance, scalability, maintainability, the ability to find people with the
right experience, etc. Understanding the technology choices can also assist with high-level
estimating and planning, which is useful if you need to understand whether you can achieve
your goal given a limited budget.
If you dont understand the trade-offs that youre making by choosing technology X over
Y, you shouldnt be making those decisions. Its crucial that the people designing software
systems understand technology. This is why software architects should be master builders.
Technology isnt just an implementation detail and the technology decisions that you make
are as important as the way that you decompose, structure and design your software system.
Defer technology decisions at your peril.

26. More layers = more complexity

One of the key functional requirements of the financial risk system case study that we run
through on the training course is that the solution should be able to distribute data to a subset
of users on a corporate LAN. Clearly there are 101 different ways to solve this problem, with
one of the simplest being to allow the users to access the data via an internal web application.
Since only a subset of the users within the organisation should be able to see the data, any
solution would need some sort of authentication and authorisation on the data.
Given the buzz around Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications in recent times, one of the
groups on a training course decided that it would be nice to allow the data to be accessed
via a Microsoft Silverlight application. Theyd already thought about building an ASP.NET
application but liked the additional possibilities offered by Silverlight, such as the ability to
slice and dice the data interactively. Another driving factor for their decision was that the
Silverlight client could be delivered for free in that it would take just as long to build as
an ASP.NET application. For free is a pretty bold claim, especially considering that they
were effectively adding an extra architectural layer into their software system. I sketched up
the following summary of their design to illustrate the added complexity.

More layers = more complexity

76

While I dont disagree that Silverlight applications arent hard to build, the vital question
the group hadnt addressed was where the data was going to come from. As always, there
are options; from accessing the database directly through to exposing some data services in
a middle-tier. The group had already considered deploying some Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF) services into the IIS web server as the mechanism for exposing the data,
but this led to yet further questions.
1. What operations do you need to expose to the Silverlight client?
2. Which technology binding and protocol would you use?
3. How do you ensure that people cant plug in their own bespoke WCF client and
consume the services?
4. How do you deploy and test it?
5. etc

Non-functional requirements
In the context of the case study, the third question is important. The data should only be
accessible by a small number of people and we really dont want to expose a web service
that anybody with access to a development tool could consume.
Most security conscious organisations have their self-hosted public facing web servers
firewalled away in a DMZ, yet Ive seen some software systems where those same secured
web servers subsequently access unsecured web services residing on servers within the
regular corporate LAN. Assuming that I can connect a laptop to the corporate LAN, theres
usually nothing to stop me firing up a development tool such as Microsoft Visual Studio,
locating the service definition (e.g. a WSDL file) and consuming the web service for my own
misuse. In this case, thought needs to be given to authentication and authorisation of the
data service as well as the Silverlight client. A holistic view of security needs to be taken.

Time and budget - nothing is free

Coming back to the claim that building a Silverlight client wont take longer than building
an ASP.NET application; this isnt true because of the additional data services that need to
be developed to support the Silverlight client. In this situation, the benefits introduced by the
additional rich client layer need to be considered on the basis that additional complexity is
also being introduced. All architecture decisions involve trade-offs. More moving parts means

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77

more work designing, developing, testing and deploying. Despite what vendor marketing
hype might say, nothing is ever free and you need to evaluate the pros and cons of
adding additional layers into a design, particularly if they result in additional inter-process
communication.

27. Collaborative design can help and

hinder
Lets imagine that youve been tasked with building a 3-tier web application and you
have a small team that includes people with specialisms in web technology, server-side
programming and databases. From a resourcing point of view this is excellent because
collectively you have experience across the entire stack. You shouldnt have any problems
then, right?
The effectiveness of the overall team comes down to a number of factors, one of them being
peoples willingness to leave their egos at the door and focus on delivering the best solution
given the context. Sometimes though, individual specialisms can work against a team; simply
through a lack of experience in working as a team or because ego gets in the way of the
common goal. If theres a requirement to provide a way for a user to view and manipulate
data on our 3-tier web application, youll probably get a different possible approach from
each of your specialists.
Web developer: Just give me the data as JSON and we can do anything we want with
it on the web-tier. We can even throw in some JQuery to dynamically manipulate the
dataset in the browser.
Server-side developer: We should reuse and extend some of the existing business
logic in the middle-tier service layer. This increases reuse, is more secure than sending
all of the data to the web-tier and we can write automated unit tests around it all.
Database developer: Youre both idiots. Its way more efficient for me to write a stored
procedure that will provide you with exactly the data that you need. :-)

Experience influences software design

Our own knowledge, experience and preferences tend to influence how we design software,
particularly if its being done as a solo activity. In the absence of communication, we tend to
make assumptions about where components will sit and how features will work based upon
our own mental model of how the sofware should be designed. Getting these assumptions
out into the open as early as possible can really help you avoid some nasty surprises before

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79

its too late. One of the key reasons I prefer using a whiteboard to design software is because
it encourages a more collaborative approach than somebody sitting on their own in front of
their favourite modelling tool on a laptop. If youre collaborating, youre also communicating
and challenging each other.
Like pair programming, collaborating is an effective way to approach the software design
process, particularly if its done in a lightweight way. Collaboration increases quality plus it
allows us to discuss and challenge some of the common assumptions that we make based our
own knowledge, experience and preferences. It also paves the way for collective ownership
of the code, which again helps to break down the silos that often form within software
development teams. Everybody on the team will have different ideas and those different
ideas need to meet.

28. Software architecture is a

platform for conversation
If youre writing software as a part of your day-to-day job, then its likely that your
software isnt going to live in isolation. We tend to feel safe in our little project teams,
particularly when everybody knows each other and team spirits are high. Weve even
built up development processes around helping us communicate better, prioritise better and
ultimately deliver better software. However, many software projects are still developed in
isolation by teams that are locked away from their users and their operational environments.
The success of agile methods has shown us that we need to have regular communication
with the end-users or their representatives so we can be sure were building software that
will meet their needs. But what about all of those other stakeholders? Project teams might
have a clear vision about what the software should do but often youll hear phrases like this,
often late in the delivery cycle.

Nobody told us you needed a production database created on this server.

We cant upgrade to [Java 7|.NET 4] on that server until system X is compatible.
We dont have spare production licenses.
Sorry, that contravenes our security policy.
Sorry, well need to undertake some operational acceptance testing before we promote
your application into the production environment.
How exactly are we supposed to support this application?
I dont care if you have a completely automated release process Im not giving you
the production database credentials for your configuration files.
We need to run this past the risk and compliance team.
Theres no way your system is going on the public cloud.

Software development isnt just about delivering

features
The people who use your software are just one type of stakeholder. There are usually many
others including:

Software architecture is a platform for conversation

81

Current development team: The current team need to understand the architecture
and be aware of the drivers so that they produce a solution that is architecturally
consistent and works.
Future development team: Any future development/maintenance teams need to have
the same information to hand so that they understand how the solution works and are
able to modify it in a consistent way.
Other teams: Often your software needs to integrate with other systems within the
environment, from bespoke software systems through to off-the-shelf vendor products,
so its crucial that everybody agrees on how this will work.
Database administrators: Some organisations have separate database teams that need
to understand how your solution uses their database services (e.g. from design and
optimisation through to capacity planning and archiving).
Operations/support staff: Operational staff typically need to understand how to run
and support your system (e.g. configuration and deployment through to monitoring
and problem diagnostics).
Compliance, risk and audit: Some organisations have strict regulations that they need
to follow and people in your organisation may need to certify that youre following
them too.
Security team: Likewise with security; some organisations have dedicated security
teams that need to review systems before they are permitted into production environments.
These are just some of the stakeholders that may have an interest in your architecture, but
there are probably others depending on your organisation and the way that it works. If you
think you can put together a software architecture in an ivory tower on your own, youre
probably doing it wrong. Software architectures dont live in isolation and the software
design process is a platform for conversation. A five minute conversation now could help
capture those often implied architectural drivers and improve your chance of a successful
delivery.

29. Questions
1. What are the major factors that influence the resulting architecture of a software
system? Can you list those that are relevant to the software system that you are
working on?
2. What are non-functional requirements and why are they important? When should you
think about non-functional requirements?
3. Time and budget are the constraints that most people instantly relate to, but can you
identify more?
4. Is your software development team working with a well-known set of architectural
principles? What are they? Are they clearly understood by everybody on the team?
5. How do you approach the software design process? Does your team approach it in
the same way? Can it be clearly articulated? Can you help others follow the same
approach?

IV Agility and the essence of

software architecture
This, the final part of the book, is about how everything else covered in the book fits into
the day-to-day world of software development. Well also answer the question of how much
software architecture (and therefore, up front design) you should do and how to create firm
foundations.

30. The conflict between agile and

architecture - myth or reality?
The words agile and architecture are often seen as mutually exclusive but the real world
often tells a different story. Some software teams see architecture as an unnecessary evil
whereas others have reached the conclusion that they do need to think about architecture
once again.
Architecture can be summarised as being about structure and vision, with a key part of the
process focussed on understanding the significant design decisions. Unless youre running the
leanest of startups and you genuinely dont know which direction youre heading in, even the
most agile of software projects will have some architectural concerns and these things really
should be thought about up front. Agile software projects therefore do need architecture,
but this seems to contradict with how agile has been evangelised for the past 10+ years.
Put simply, there is no conflict between agile and architecture because agile projects need
architecture. So, where is the conflict then?

Conflict 1: Team structure

The first conflict between architecture and agile software development approaches is
related to team structure. Traditional approaches to software architecture usually result in
a dedicated software architect, triggering thoughts of ivory tower dictators who are a long
way removed from the process of building software. This unfortunate stereotype of solution
architects delivering large design documents to the development team before running away
to cause havoc elsewhere has resulted in a backlash against having a dedicated architect on
a software development team.
One of the things that agile software development teams strive towards is reducing the
amount of overhead associated with communication via document hand-offs. Its rightly
about increasing collaboration and reducing waste, with organisations often preferring to
create small teams of generalising specialists who can turn their hand to almost any task.
Indeed, because of the way in which agile approaches have been evangelised, there is often
a perception that agile teams must consist of cross-discipline team members and simply left
to self-organise. The result? Many agile teams will tell you that they dont need no stinkin
architects!

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85

Conflict 2: Process and outputs

The second conflict is between the process and the desired outputs of agile versus those of
big up front design, which is what people usually refer to when they talk about architecture.
One of the key goals of agile approaches is to deliver customer value, frequently and in
small chunks. Its about moving fast, getting feedback and embracing change. The goal of
big design up front is to settle on an understanding of everything that needs to be delivered
before putting a blueprint (and usually a plan) in place.
The agile manifesto values responding to change over following a plan, but of course this
doesnt mean you shouldnt do any planning and it seems that some agile teams are afraid of
doing any analysis at all. The result is that in trying to avoid big up front design, agile teams
often do not design up front and instead use terms like emergent design or evolutionary
architecture to justify their approach. Ive even heard teams claim that their adoption of
test-driven development (TDD) negates the need for architecture, but these are often the
same teams that get trapped in a constant refactoring cycle at some point in the future.

Software architecture provides boundaries for TDD,

BDD, DDD, RDD and clean code
One of the recurring questions I get asked whenever I talk to teams about software
architecture is how it relates to techniques such as TDD, BDD, DDD, RDD, etc. The question
really relates to whether xDD is a substitute for software architecture, particularly within
agile environments. The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that the process of
thinking about software architecture is really about putting some boundaries in place, inside
which you can build your software using whatever xDD and agile practices you like.
For me, the why? is simple - you need to think about the architectural drivers (the things
that play a huge part in influencing the resulting software architecture), including:
Functional requirements: Requirements drive architecture. You need to know vaguely
what youre building, irrespective of how you capture and record those requirements
(i.e. user stories, use cases, requirements specifications, acceptance tests, etc).
Quality attributes: The non-functional requirements (e.g. performance, scalability,
security, etc) are usually technical in nature and are hard to retrofit. They ideally
need to be baked into the initial design and ignoring these qualities will lead you to a
software system that is either over- or under-engineered.

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86

Constraints: The real-world usually has constraints; ranging from approved technology lists, prescribed integration standards, target deployment environment, size of
team, etc. Again, not considering these could cause you to deliver a software system
that doesnt complement your environment, adding unnecessary friction.
Principles: These are the things that you want to adopt in an attempt to provide
consistency and clarity to the software. From a design perspective, this includes
things like your decomposition strategy (e.g. layers vs components vs micro-services),
separation of concerns, architectural patterns, etc. Explicitly outlining a starting set of
principles is essential so that the team building the software starts out heading in the
same direction.

Separating architecture from ivory towers and big up

front design
These conflicts, in many cases, lead to chaotic teams that lack an appropriate amount of
technical leadership. The result? Software systems that look like big balls of mud and/or
dont satisfy key architectural drivers such as non-functional requirements.
Architecture is about the stuff thats hard or costly to change. Its about the big or significant
decisions, the sort of decisions that you cant easily refactor in an afternoon. This includes,
for example, the core technology choices, the overall high-level structure (the big picture)
and an understanding of how youre going to solve any complex/risky/significant problems.
Software architecture is important.
Big up front design typically covers these architectural concerns but it also tends to go much
further, often unnecessarily so. The trick here is to differentiate whats important from whats
not. Defining a high-level structure to put a vision in place is important. Drawing a countless
number of detailed class diagrams before writing the code most likely isnt. Understanding
how youre going to solve a tricky performance requirement is important, understanding the
length of every database column most likely isnt.
Agile and architecture arent in conflict. Rather than blindly following what others say,
software teams need to cut through the hype and understand the technical leadership style
and quantity of up front design that they need given their own unique context.
Considering the architectural drivers neednt take very long and can provide you with a
starting point for the rest of the software design activities. Of course, this doesnt mean that
the architecture shouldnt be changed, especially when you start writing code and getting
feedback. The point is that you now have a framework and some boundaries to work within,

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which provide some often needed vision and guidance for the team. My experience suggests
that a little direction can go a long way.

31. Quantifying risk

Identifying risks is a crucial part of doing just enough up front design and, put simply, a
risk is something bad that may happen in the future, such as a chosen technology not being
able to fulfil the promises that the vendor makes. Not all risks are created equal though, with
some being more important than others. For example, a risk that may make your software
project fail should be treated as a higher priority than something that may cause the team
some general discomfort.
Assuming that you have a list of risks (and risk-storming is a great technique for doing
this), how do you quantify each of those risks and assess their relative priorities? There are
a number of well established approaches to quantifying risk; including assigning a value of
low, medium or high or even a simple numeric value between 1 and 10, with higher numbers
representing higher levels of risk.

Probability vs impact
A good way to think about risk is to separate out the probability of that risk happening from
the negative impact of it happening.
Probability: How likely is it that the risk will happen? Do you think that the chance
is remote or would you be willing to bet cash on it?
Impact: What is the negative impact if the risk does occur? Is there general discomfort
for the team or is it back to the drawing board? Or will it cause your software project
to fail?
Both probability and impact can be quantified as low, medium, high or simply as a numeric
value. If you think about probability and impact separately, you can then plot the overall
score on a matrix by multiplying the scores together as illustrated in the following diagram.

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Quantifying risk

A probability/impact matrix for quantifying risk

Prioritising risk
Prioritising risks is then as simple as ranking them according to their score. A risk with a low
probability and a low impact can be treated as a low priority risk. Conversely, a risk with
a high probability and a high impact needs to be given a high priority. As indicated by the
colour coding
Green: a score of 1 or 2; the risk is low priority.
Amber: a score of 3 or 4; the risk is medium priority.
Red: a score of 6 or 9; the risk is high priority.
Its often difficult to prioritise which risks you should take care of and if you get it wrong,
youll put the risk mitigation effort in the wrong place. Quantifying risks provides you with
a way to focus on those risks that are most likely to cause your software project to fail or you
to be fired.

32. Risk-storming
Risk identification is a crucial part of doing just enough up front design but its something
that many software teams shy away from because its often seen as a boring chore. Riskstorming is a quick, fun, collaborative and visual technique for identifying risk that the whole
team can take part in. There are 4 steps.

Step 1. Draw some architecture diagrams

The first step is to draw some architecture diagrams on whiteboards or large sheets of flip
chart paper. Ideally this should be a collection of diagrams at different levels of abstraction
because each diagram will allow you to highlight different risks across your architecture.
Large diagrams are better.

Step 2. Identify the risks individually

Risks can be subjective, so ask everybody on the team (architects, developers, project managers, operational staff, etc) to stand in front of the architecture diagrams and individually
write down the risks that they can identify, one per sticky note. Additionally, ask people to
quantify each risk based upon probability and impact. Ideally, use different colours of sticky
note to represent the different risk priorities. You can timebox this part of the exercise to
5-10 minutes to ensure that it doesnt drag on and this step should be done in silence, with
everybody keeping their sticky notes hidden. Here are some examples of the risks to look for:

Data formats from third-party systems change unexpectedly.

External systems become unavailable.
Components run too slowly.
Components dont scale.
Key components crash.
Single points of failure.
Data becomes corrupted.
Infrastructure fails.

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Disks fill up.

New technology doesnt work as expected.
New technology is too complex to work with.
etc

As with software development estimates, peoples perceptions of risk can be subjective based
upon their experience. If youre planning on using a new technology, hopefully somebody on
the team will identify that there is a risk associated with doing this. Also, somebody might
quantify the risk of using new technology relatively highly whereas others might not feel
the same if theyve used that same technology before. Identifying risks individually allows
everybody to contribute to the risk identification process and youll gain a better view of the
risks perceived by the team rather than only from those designing the software or leading
the team.

Step 3. Converge the risks on the diagrams

Next, ask everybody to place their sticky notes onto the architecture diagrams, sticking them
in close proximity to the area where the risk has been identified. For example, if you identify
a risk that one of your components will run too slowly, put the sticky note over the top of
that component on the architecture diagram.

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Risk-storming

Converge the risks on the diagrams

This part of the technique is visual and, once complete, lets you see at a glance where the
highest areas of risk are. If several people have identified similar risks youll get a clustering
of sticky notes on top of the diagrams as peoples ideas converge.

Step 4. Prioritise the risks

Now you can take each sticky note (or cluster of sticky notes) and agree on how you will
collectively quantify the risk that has been identified.
Individual sticky notes: Ask the person who identified the risk what their reason was
and collectively agree on the probability and impact. After discussion, if either the
probability or impact turns out to be none, take the sticky note off of the architecture
diagram but dont throw it away just yet.
Clusters of sticky notes: If the probability and impact are the same on each sticky
note, youre done. If they arent, youll need to collectively agree on how to quantify
the risk in the same way that you agree upon estimates during a Planning Poker or
Wideband Delphi session. Look at the outliers and understand the rationale behind
people quantifying the risk accordingly.

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Mitigation strategies
Identifying the risks associated with your software architecture is an essential exercise
but you also need to come up with mitigation strategies, either to prevent the risks from
happening in the first place or to take corrective action if the risk does happen. Since the
risks are now prioritised, you can focus on the highest priority ones first.
There are a number of mitigation strategies the are applicable depending upon the type of
risk, including:
1. Education: Training the team, restructuring it or hiring new team members in areas
where you lack experience (e.g. with new technology).
2. Prototypes: Creating prototypes where they are needed to mitigate technical risks by
proving that something does or doesnt work. Since risk-storming is a visual technique,
it lets you easily see the stripes through your software system that you should perhaps
look at in more detail with prototypes.
3. Rework: Changing your software architecture to remove or reduce the probability/impact of identified risks (e.g. removing single points of failure, adding a cache to protect
from third-party system outages, etc). If you do decide to change your architecture,
you can re-run the risk-storming exercise to check whether the change has had the
desired effect.

When to use risk-storming

Risk-storming is a quick, fun technique that provides a collaborative way to identify and
visualise risks. As an aside, this technique can be used for anything that you can visualise;
from enterprise architectures through to business processes and workflows. It can be used at
the start of a software development project (when youre coming up with the initial software
architecture) or throughout, during iteration planning sessions or retrospectives.
Just make sure that you keep a log of the risks that are identified, including those that you
later agree have a probability or impact of none. Additionally, why not keep the architecture
diagrams with the sticky notes on the wall of your project room so that everybody can see
this additional layer of information. Identifying risks is essential in preventing project failure
and it doesnt need to be a chore if you get the whole team involved.

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Collective ownership
As a final point related to risks, who owns the risks on most software projects anyway? From
my experience, the risk register (if there is one) is usually owned by the lone non-technical
project manager. Does this make sense? Do they understand the technical risks? Do they
really care about the technical risks?
A better approach is to assign ownership of technical risks to the software architecture role.
By all means keep a central risk register, but just ensure that somebody on the team is actively
looking after the technical risks, particularly those that will cause your project to be cancelled
or you to be fired. And, of course, sharing the software architecture role amongst the team
paves the way for collective ownership of the risks too.

33. Just enough up front design

One of the major points of disagreement about software relates to how much up front design
to do. People are very polarised as to when they should do design and how much they should
do. From my experience of working with software teams, the views basically break down like
this.
We need to do all of the software architecture up front, before we start coding.
Software architecture doesnt need to be done up front; well evolve it as we progress.
Meh, we dont need to do software architecture, we have an excellent team.
These different views do raise an interesting question, how much architecture do you need
to do up front?

It comes back to methodology

One of the key reasons for the disagreement can be found in how teams work, and specifically
what sort of development methodology they are following. If you compare the common
software development approaches on account of how much up front design they advocate,
youd have something like the following diagram.

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At one end of the scale you have waterfall that, in its typical form, suggests big design up
front where everything must be decided, reviewed and signed-off before a line of code is
written. And at the other end you have the agile approaches that, on the face of it, shy away
from doing architecture.
At this point its worth saying that this isnt actually true. Agile methods dont say dont
do architecture, just as they dont say dont produce any documentation. Agile is about
sufficiency, moving fast, embracing change, feedback and delivering value. But since agile
approaches and their evangelists dont put much emphasis on the architectural aspects of
software development, many people have misinterpreted this to mean agile says dont do
any architecture. More commonly, agile teams choose to spread the design work out across
the project rather than doing it all up front. There are several names for this, including
evolutionary architecture and emergent design. Depending on the size and complexity
of the software system along with the experience and maturity of the team, this could
unfortunately end up as foolishly hoping for the best.
Sitting between the ends of the scale are methods like the Rational Unified Process (RUP),
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and DSDM Atern. These are flexible process frameworks
that can be implemented by taking all or part of them. Although many RUP implementations
have typically been heavyweight monsters that have more in common with waterfall
approaches, it can be scaled down to exhibit a combination of characteristics that lets it
take the centre ground on the scale. DAD is basically a trimmed down version of RUP, and
DSDM Atern is a similar iterative and incremental method that is also influenced by the agile

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movement. All three are risk-driven methodologies that basically say, gather the majority
of the key requirements at a high level, get the risky stuff out of the way, then iterate and
increment. DSDM Atern even uses the term firm foundations to describe this. Done right,
these methods can lead to a nice balance of up front design and evolutionary architecture.

You need to do just enough

My approach to up front architecture and design is that you need to do just enough. If you
say this to people they either think its an inspirational breath of fresh air that fits in with
all of their existing beliefs or they think its a complete cop out! Just enough works as a
guideline but its vague and doesnt do much to help people assess how much is enough.
Based upon my definition of architecture, you could say that you need to do just enough up
front design to give you structure and vision. In other words, do enough so that you know
what your goal is and how youre going to achieve it. This is a better guideline, but it still
doesnt provide any concrete advice.
It turns out that while just enough up front design is hard to quantify, many people have
strong opinions on too little or too much based upon their past experience. Heres a
summary of those thoughts from software developers Ive met over the past few years.

How much up front design is too little?

No understanding of what and where the system boundary is.

No common understanding of the big picture within the team.
Inability to communicate the overall vision.
Team members arent clear or comfortable with what they need to do.
No thought about non-functional requirements/quality attributes.
No thought about how the constraints of the (real-world) environment affect the
software (e.g. deployment environment).
No thoughts on key areas of risk; such as non-functional requirements, external
interfaces, etc.
The significant problems and/or their answers havent been identified.
No thought on separation of concerns, appropriate levels of abstraction, layering,
modifiability, flex points, etc.
No common understanding of the role that the architect(s) will play.
Inconsistent approaches to solving problems.
A lack of control and guidance for the team.

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Significant change to the architecture during the project lifecycle that could have been
anticipated.
Too many design alternatives and options, often with team members disagreeing on
the solution or way forward.
Uncertainty over whether the design will work (e.g. no prototyping was performed as
a part of the design process).
A lack of technology choices (i.e. unnecessary deferral).

How much up front design is too much?

Too much information (i.e. long documents and/or information overload).

A design that is too detailed at too many levels of abstraction.
Too many diagrams.
Writing code or pseudo-code in documentation.
An architecture that is too rigid with no flexibility.
All decisions at all levels of abstraction have been made.
Class level design with numerous sequence diagrams showing all possible interactions.
Detailed entity relationship models and database designs (e.g. tables, views, stored
procedures and indexes).
Analysis paralysis and a team that is stuck focussing on minor details.
Coding becomes a simple transformation of design artefacts to code, which is boring
and demotivating for the team.
An unbounded design phase (i.e. time and/or budget).
The deadline has been reached without any coding.

How much is just enough?

Its easy to identify with many of the answers above but just enough sits in that grey area
somewhere between the two extremes. The key is that architecture represents the significant
decisions, where significance is measured by cost of change. In other words, its the stuff
thats really expensive to modify and the stuff that you really do need to get right as early
as possible. For example, qualities such as high performance, high scalability, high security
and high availability generally need to be baked into the foundations early on because they
are hard to retrofit into an existing codebase. The significant decisions also include the stuff
that you cant easily refactor in an afternoon; such as the overall structure, core technology
choices, architectural patterns, core frameworks and so on.

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Back to RUP for a second, and it uses the term architecturally significant, advising that you
should figure out what might be significant to your architecture. What might be significant?
Well, its anything thats costly to change, is complex (e.g. tricky non-functional requirements
or constraints) or is new. In reality, these are the things with a higher than normal risk of
consequences if you dont get them right. Its worth bearing in mind that the significant
elements are often subjective too and can vary depending on the experience of the team.

Firm foundations
What you have here then is an approach to software development that lets you focus on
whats risky in order to build sufficient foundations to move forward with. The identification
of architecturally significant elements and their corresponding risks is something that should
be applied to all software projects, regardless of methodology. Some agile projects already
do this by introducing a sprint zero, although some agile evangelists will say that youre
doing it wrong if you need to introduce an architecture sprint. I say that you need to do
whatever works for you based upon your own context.
Although all of this provides some guidance, the answer to how much is just enough?
needs one of those it depends type answers because all software teams are different. Some
teams will be more experienced, some teams will need more guidance, some teams will
continually work together, some teams will rotate and change frequently, some software
systems will have a large amount of essential complexity, etc. How much architecture do
you need to do then? I say that you need to do just enough in order to do the following,
which applies whether the software architecture role is being performed by a single person
or shared amongst the team.
1. Structure
What: Understand the significant structural elements and how they fit together,
based upon the architectural drivers.
How: Design and decomposition down to components.
2. Vision
What: Create and communicate a vision for the team to work with.
How: Visualise your software architecture using a collection of diagrams at
varying levels of abstraction.
3. Risks
What: Identify and mitigate the highest priority risks.
How: Risk-storming and concrete experiments.

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This minimal set of software architecture practices will provide you with firm foundations
that underpin the rest of the software delivery, both in terms of the product being built and
the team that is building it. Some architecture usually does need to be done up front, but
some doesnt and can naturally evolve. Deciding where the line sits between mandatory and
evolutionary design is the key.

Contextualising just enough up front design

In reality, the how much up front design is enough? question must be answered by you and
heres my advice go and practice architecting a software system. Find or create a smallmedium size software project scenario and draft a very short set of high-level requirements
(functional and non-functional) to describe it. This could be an existing system that youve
worked on or something new and unrelated to your domain such as the financial risk system
that I use on my training course. With this in place, ask two or more groups of 2-3 people
to come up with a solution by choosing some technology, doing some design and drawing
some diagrams to communicate the vision. Timebox the activity (e.g. 90 minutes) and then
hold an open review session where the following types of questions are asked about each of
the solutions:

Will the architecture work? If not, why not?

Have all of the key risks been identified?
Is the architecture too simple? Is it too complex?
Has the architecture been communicated effectively?
What do people like about the diagrams? What can be improved?
Is there too much detail? Is there enough detail?
Could you give this to your team as a starting point?
Is there too much control? Is there not enough guidance?
Are you happy with the level of technology decisions that have been made or deferred?

Think of this exercise as an architectural kata except that you perform a review that focusses
additionally on the process you went through and the outputs rather than just the architecture
itself. Capture your findings and try to distill them into a set of guidelines for how to approach
the software design process in the future. Agree upon and include examples of how much
detail to go down into, agree on diagram notation and include examples of good diagrams,
determine the common constraints within your own environment, etc. If possible, run the

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exercise again with the guidelines in mind to see how it changes things. One day is typically
enough time to run through this exercise with a couple of design/communicate/review cycles.
No two software teams are the same. Setting aside a day to practice the software design
process within your own environment will provide you with a consistent starting point for
tackling the process in the future and help you contextualise exactly what just enough up
front design means to you and your team. An additional benefit of practicing the software
design process is that its a great way to coach and mentor others. Are you striving for a
self-organising team where everybody is able to perform the software architecture role?

34. Agility
In my experience, people tend to use the word agile to refer to a couple of things. The first
is when talking about agile approaches to software development; moving fast, embracing
change, releasing often, getting feedback and so on. The second use of the word relates to
the agile mindset and how people work together in agile environments. This is usually about
team dynamics, systems thinking, psychology and other things you might associate with
creating high performing teams.
Leaving the latter fluffy stuff aside, for me, labelling a software architecture as being
agile means that it can react to change within its environment, adapting to the ever
changing requirements that people throw at it. This isnt necessarily the same as the software
architecture that an agile team will create. Delivering software in an agile way doesnt
guarantee that the resulting software architecture will be agile. In fact, in my experience,
the opposite typically happens because teams are more focussed on delivering functionality
rather than looking after their architecture.

Understanding agility
To understand how much agility you need from your software architecture, its worth looking
at what agility means. John Boyd, a fighter pilot in the US Air Force, came up with a concept
that he called the OODA loop - Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. In essence, this loop forms
the basis for the decision making process. Imagine that you are a fighter pilot in a dogfight
with an adversary. In order to outwit your opponent in this situation, you need to observe
whats happening, orient yourself (e.g. do some analysis), decide what to do and then act. In
the heat of the battle, this loop needs to be executed as fast as possible to avoid being shot
down by your opponent. Boyd then says that you can confuse and disorient your opponent
if you can get inside their OODA loop, by which he means execute it faster than they can. If
youre more agile than your opponent, youre the one that will come out on top.
In a paper titled What Lessons Can the Agile Community Learn from A Maverick Fighter
Pilot?, Steve Adolph, from the University of British Columbia, takes Boyds concept and
applies it to software development. The conclusion drawn is that agility is relative and
time-based. If your software team cant deliver software and keep pace with changes in the
environment, your team is not agile. If youre working in a large, slow moving organisation

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that rarely changes, you can probably take months to deliver software and still be considered
agile by the organisation. In a lean startup, thats likely to not be the case.

A good architecture enables agility

The driver for having this discussion is that a good software architecture enables agility.
Although Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is seen as a dirty term within some organisations due to over-complex, bloated and bodged implementations, theres a growing trend
of software systems being made up of tiny microservices, where each service only does one
thing but does that thing very well. A microservice may typically be less than one hundred
lines of code. If change is needed, services can be rewritten from scratch, potentially in a
different programming language. This style of architecture provides agility in a number
of ways. Small, loosely coupled components/services can be built, modified and tested in
isolation, or even ripped out and replaced depending on how requirements change. This
style of architecture also lends itself well to a very flexible and adaptable deployment model,
since new components/services can be added and scaled if needed.
However, nothing in life is ever free. Building a software system like this takes time, effort
and discipline. Many people dont need this level of adaptability and agility either, which is
why you see so many teams building software systems that are much more monolithic in
nature, where everything is bundled together and deployed as a single unit. Although simpler
to build, this style of architecture usually takes more effort to adapt in the face of changing
requirements because functionality is often interwoven across the codebase.

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Agility

Different software architectures provide differing levels of agility

In my view, both architectural styles have their advantages and disadvantages, with the
decision to build a monolithic system vs one composed of microservices coming back to
the trade-offs that you are willing to make. As with all things in the IT industry, theres a
middle ground between these extremes. With pragmatism in mind, you can always opt to
build a software system that consists of a number of small well-defined components, yet is
still deployed as a single unit. The Wikipedia page for Component-based development has a
good summary and a component might be something like a risk calculator, audit logger,
report generator, data importer, etc. The simplest way to think about a component is that
its a set of related behaviours behind an interface, which may be implemented using one or
more collaborating classes (assuming an OO language). Good components share a number
of characteristics with good classes and, of course, good microservices: high cohesion, low
coupling, a well-defined public interface, good encapsulation, etc. Well-defined components
provide a stepping stone to migrate to a microservice architecture more easily at a later date,
if you need the benefits given the additional cost and complexity that such an architecturalstyle provides.

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Well-defined, in-process components is a stepping stone to out-of-process components (i.e. microservices)

Agility as a quality attribute

Understanding the speed at which your organisation or business changes is important
because it can help you decide upon the style of architecture to adopt; whether thats a
monolithic architecture, a microservices architecture or something in between. You need
to understand the trade-offs and make your choices accordingly. Treat agility as a quality
attribute. You dont get agility for free.

35. Introducing software architecture

A little software architecture discipline has a huge potential to improve the success of
software teams, essentially through the introduction of technical leadership. With this in
mind, the final question that we need to address is how to get software teams to adopt a
just enough approach to software architecture, to ensure they build well-structured software
systems that satisfy the goals, particularly with respect to any complex non-functional
requirements and constraints. Often, this question becomes how to we reintroduce software
architecture back into the way that software teams work.
In my view, the big problem that software architecture has as a discipline is that its
competing with all of the shiny new things created in the software industry on a seemingly
daily basis. Ive met thousands of software developers from around the world and, in my
experience, theres a large number of them that dont think about software architecture
as much as they should. Despite the volume of educational material out there, teams lack
knowledge about what software architecture really is.
People have limited time and energy for learning but a lack of time isnt often the reason that
teams dont understand what software architecture is all about. When I was moving into my
early software architecture roles, I, like others Ive spoken to, struggled to understand how
much of what I read about in the software architecture books related to what I should doing
on a daily basis. This lack of understanding is made worse because most software developers
dont get to practice architecting software on a regular basis. How many software systems
have you architected during your own career?
Simply saying that all software teams need to think about software architecture isnt enough
to make it happen though. So, how do we get software teams to reintroduce software
architecture?

Software architecture needs to be accessible

As experienced practitioners, we have a duty to educate others but we do need to take
it one step at a time. We need to remember that many people are being introduced to
software architecture with potentially no knowledge of the related research that has been
conducted in the past. Think about the terminology that you see and hear in relation to
software architecture. How would you explain to a typical software developer what a logical

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view is? When we refer to the physical view, is this about the code or the physical
infrastructure? Everybody on the development team needs to understand the essence of
software architecture and the consequences of not thinking about it before we start talking
about things like architecture description languages and evaluation methods. Information
about software architecture needs to be accessible and grounded in reality.
This may seem an odd thing to say, but the people who manage software teams also need to
understand the essence of software architecture and why its a necessary discipline. Some of
the teams Ive worked with over the years have been told by their management to stop doing
software architecture and get on with the coding. In many cases, the reason behind this is a
misunderstanding that all up front design activities need to be dropped when adopting agile
approaches. Such software development teams are usually put under immense pressure to
deliver and some up front thinking usually helps rather than hinders.

Some practical suggestions

Here are some practical suggestions for introducing software architecture.

1. Educate people
Simply run some workshops where people can learn about and understand what software
architecture is all about. This can be aimed at developers or non-developers, and it will help
to make sure that everybody is talking the same language. At a minimum, you should look
to cover:
What software architecture is.
Why software architecture is important.
The practices you want to adopt.

2. Talk about architecture in retrospectives

If you have regular retrospectives to reflect on how your team is performing, why not simply
include software architecture on the list of topics that you talk about? If you dont think
that enough consideration is being given to software architecture, perhaps because youre
constantly refactoring the architecture of your software or youre having issues with some
non-functional characteristics, then think about the software architecture practices that you
can adopt to help. On the flip side, if youre spending too much time thinking about software
architecture or up front design, perhaps its time to look at the value of this work and whether
any practices can be dropped or substituted.

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3. Definition of done
If you have a definition of done for work items, add software architecture to the list.
This will help ensure that you consider architectural implications of the work item and
conformance of the implementation with any desired architectural patterns/rules or nonfunctional goals.

4. Allocate the software architecture role to somebody

If you have a software team that doesnt think about software architecture, simply allocating
the software architecture role to somebody appropriate on the team may kickstart this
because youre explicitly giving ownership and responsibility for the software architecture
to somebody. Allocating the role to more than one person does work with some teams, but I
find it better that one person takes ownership initially, with a view to sharing it with others
as the team gains more experience. Some teams dislike the term software architect and use
the term architecture owner instead. Whatever you call it, coaching and collaboration are
key.

5. Architecture katas
Words alone are not enough and the skeptics need to see that architecture is not about big
design up front. This is why I run short architecture katas where small teams collaboratively
architect a software solution for a simple set of requirements, producing one or more
diagrams to visualise and communicate their solutions to others. This allows people to
experience that up front design doesnt necessarily mean designing everything to a very low
level of abstraction and it provides a way to practice communicating software architecture.

Making change happen

Heres a relatively common question from people that understand why software architecture
is good, but dont know how to introduce it into their projects.
I understand the need for software architecture but our team just doesnt have
the time to do it because were so busy coding our product. Having said that, we
dont have consistent approaches to solving problems, etc. Our managers wont
give us time to do architecture. If were doing architecture, were not coding.
How do we introduce architecture?

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Its worth asking a few questions to understand the need for actively thinking about software
architecture:
1. What problems is the lack of software architecture causing now?
2. What problems is the lack of software architecture likely to cause in the future?
3. Is there a risk that these problems will lead to more serious consequences (e.g. loss of
reputation, business, customers, money, etc)?
4. Has something already gone wrong?
One of the things that I tell people new to the architecture role is that they do need to dedicate
some time to doing architecture work (the big picture stuff) but a balance needs to be struck
between this and the regular day-to-day development activities. If youre coding all of the
time then that big picture stuff doesnt get done. On the flip-side, spending too much time
on software architecture means that you dont ever get any coding done, and we all know
that pretty diagrams are no use to end-users!
How do we introduce software architecture? is one of those questions that doesnt have a
straightforward answer because it requires changes to the way that a software team works,
and these can only really be made when you understand the full context of the team. On a
more general note though, there are two ways that teams tend to change the way that they
work.
1. Reactively: The majority of teams will only change the way that they work based
upon bad things happening. In other words, theyll change if and only if theres a
catalyst. This could be anything from a continuous string of failed system deployments
or maybe something like a serious system failure. In these cases, the team knows
something is wrong, probably because their management is giving them a hard time,
and they know that something needs to be done to fix the situation. This approach
unfortunately appears to be in the majority across the software industry.
2. Proactively: Some teams proactively seek to improve the way that they work. Nothing
bad might have happened yet, but they can see that theres room for improvement
to prevent the sort of situations mentioned previously. These teams are, ironically,
usually the better ones that dont need to change, but they do understand the benefits
associated with striving for continouous improvement.
Back to the original question and in essence the team was asking permission to spend some
time doing the architecture stuff but they werent getting buy-in from their management.

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Perhaps their management didnt clearly understand the benefits of doing it or the consequences of not doing it. Either way, the team didnt achieve the desired result. Whenever
Ive been in this situation myself, Ive either taken one of two approaches.
1. Present in a very clear and concise way what the current situation is and what the
issues, risks and consequences are if behaviours arent changed. Typically this is
something that you present to key decision makers, project sponsors or management.
Once they understand the risks, they can decide whether mitigating those risks is
worth the effort required to change behaviours. This requires influencing skills and
it can be a hard sell sometimes, particularly if youre new to a team that you think is
dysfunctional!
2. Lead by example by finding a problem and addressing it. This could include, for example, a lack of technical documentation, inconsistent approaches to solving problems,
too many architectural layers, inconsistent component configuration, etc. Sometimes
the initial seeds of change need to be put in place before everybody understands the
benefits in return for the effort. A little like the reaction that occurs when most people
see automated unit testing for the first time.
Each approach tends to favour different situations, and again it depends on a number of
factors. Coming back to the original question, its possible that the first approach was used
but either the message was weak or the management didnt think that mitigating the risks
of not having any dedicated architecture time was worth the financial outlay. In this
particular case, I would introduce software architecture through being proactive and leading
by example. Simply find a problem (e.g. multiple approaches to dealing with configuration,
no high-level documentation, a confusing component structure, etc) and just start to fix it.
Im not talking about downing tools and taking a few weeks out because we all know that
trying to sell a three month refactoring effort to your management is a tough proposition.
Im talking about baby steps where you evolve the situation by breaking the problem down
and addressing it a piece at a time. Take a few minutes out from your day to focus on these
sort of tasks and before you know it youve probably started to make a world of difference.
Its easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

The essence of software architecture

Many software teams are already using agile/lean approaches and more are following in
their footsteps. For this reason, any software architecture practices adopted need to add real
value otherwise the team is simply wasting time and effort. Only you can decide how much

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software architecture is just enough and only you can decide how best to lead the change
that you want to see in your team. Good luck with your journey!

36. Questions
1. Despite how agile approaches have been evangelised, are agile and architecture
really in conflict with one another?
2. If youre currently working on an agile software team, have the architectural concerns
been thought about?
3. Do you feel that you have the right amount of technical leadership in your current
software development team? If so, why? If not, why not?
4. How much up front design is enough? How do you know when you stop? Is this view
understood and shared by the whole team?
5. Many software developers undertake coding katas to hone their skills. How can you
do the same for your software architecture skills? (e.g. take some requirements plus a
blank sheet of paper and come up with the design for a software solution)
6. What is a risk? Are all risks equal?
7. Who identifies the technical risks in your team?
8. Who looks after the technical risks in your team? If its the (typically non-technical)
project manager or ScrumMaster, is this a good idea?
9. What happens if you ignore technical risks?
10. How can you proactively deal with technical risks?
11. Do you need to introduce software architecture into the way that your team works? If
so, how might you do this?

37. Appendix A: Financial Risk System

Background
A global investment bank based in London, New York and Singapore trades (buys and sells)
financial products with other banks (counterparties). When share prices on the stock markets
move up or down, the bank either makes money or loses it. At the end of the working day,
the bank needs to gain a view of how much risk they are exposed to (e.g. of losing money)
by running some calculations on the data held about their trades. The bank has an existing
Trade Data System (TDS) and Reference Data System (RDS) but need a new Risk System.

Trade Data System

The Trade Data System maintains a store of all trades made by the bank. It is already
configured to generate a file-based XML export of trade data at the close of business (5pm) in
New York. The export includes the following information for every trade made by the bank:

Trade ID
Date
Current trade value in US dollars
Counterparty ID

Reference Data System

The Reference Data System maintains all of the reference data needed by the bank. This
includes information about counterparties; each of which represents an individual, a bank,
etc. A file-based XML export is also available and includes basic information about each
counterparty. A new organisation-wide reference data system is due for completion in the
next 3 months, with the current system eventually being decommissioned.

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Functional Requirements
The high-level functional requirements for the new Risk System are as follows.
1. Import trade data from the Trade Data System.
2. Import counterparty data from the Reference Data System.
3. Join the two sets of data together, enriching the trade data with information about the
counterparty.
4. For each counterparty, calculate the risk that the bank is exposed to.
5. Generate a report that can be imported into Microsoft Excel containing the risk figures
for all counterparties known by the bank.
6. Distribute the report to the business users before the start of the next trading day (9am)
in Singapore.
7. Provide a way for a subset of the business users to configure and maintain the external
parameters used by the risk calculations.

Non-functional Requirements
The non-functional requirements for the new Risk System are as follows.

Performance
Risk reports must be generated before 9am the following business day in Singapore.

Scalability
The system must be able to cope with trade volumes for the next 5 years.
The Trade Data System export includes approximately 5000 trades now and it is
anticipated that there will be an additional 10 trades per day.
The Reference Data System counterparty export includes approximately 20,000 counterparties and growth will be negligible.
There are 40-50 business users around the world that need access to the report.

Availability
Risk reports should be available to users 24x7, but a small amount of downtime (less
than 30 minutes per day) can be tolerated.

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Failover
Manual failover is sufficient for all system components, provided that the availability
targets can be met.

Security
This system must follow bank policy that states system access is restricted to authenticated and authorised users only.
Reports must only be distributed to authorised users.
Only a subset of the authorised users are permitted to modify the parameters used in
the risk calculations.
Although desirable, there are no single sign-on requirements (e.g. integration with
Active Directory, LDAP, etc).
All access to the system and reports will be within the confines of the banks global
network.

Audit
The following events must be recorded in the system audit logs:
Report generation.
Modification of risk calculation parameters.
It must be possible to understand the input data that was used in calculating risk.

Fault Tolerance and Resilience

The system should take appropriate steps to recover from an error if possible, but all
errors should be logged.
Errors preventing a counterparty risk calculation being completed should be logged
and the process should continue.

Internationalization and Localization

All user interfaces will be presented in English only.
All reports will be presented in English only.
All trading values and risk figures will be presented in US dollars only.

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Monitoring and Management

A Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap should be sent to the banks
Central Monitoring Service in the following circumstances:
When there is a fatal error with a system component.
When reports have not been generated before 9am Singapore time.

Data Retention and Archiving

Input files used in the risk calculation process must be retained for 1 year.

Interoperability
Interfaces with existing data systems should conform to and use existing data formats.