Book Image

Becoming an Agile Software Architect

By : Rajesh R V
Book Image

Becoming an Agile Software Architect

By: Rajesh R V

Overview of this book

Many organizations have embraced Agile methodologies to transform their ability to rapidly respond to constantly changing customer demands. However, in this melee, many enterprises often neglect to invest in architects by presuming architecture is not an intrinsic element of Agile software development. Since the role of an architect is not pre-defined in Agile, many organizations struggle to position architects, often resulting in friction with other roles or a failure to provide a clear learning path for architects to be productive. This book guides architects and organizations through new Agile ways of incrementally developing the architecture for delivering an uninterrupted, continuous flow of values that meets customer needs. You'll explore various aspects of Agile architecture and how it differs from traditional architecture. The book later covers Agile architects' responsibilities and how architects can add significant value by positioning themselves appropriately in the Agile flow of work. Through examples, you'll also learn concepts such as architectural decision backlog,the last responsible moment, value delivery, architecting for change, DevOps, and evolutionary collaboration. By the end of this Agile book, you'll be able to operate as an architect in Agile development initiatives and successfully architect reliable software systems.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding Architecture in the Agile World
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: Looking through the Agile Architect's Lens
4
Section 2: Transformation of Architect Roles in Agile
8
Section 3: Essential Knowledge to Become a Successful Agile Architect
15
Section 4: Personality Traits and Organizational Influence

Architecting for change

Architecting for change is an art. It requires a change-aware mindset irrespective of working with greenfield or legacy systems. This section explains the different patterns and techniques for enabling architecting for change.

Driving technical agility with simplicity

The Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle is one of the oldest principles for relating good design and engineering. This principle originated from an American aircraft engineer, Kelly Johnson, referring to the simplicity in designing military aircraft to be repaired with a limited set of tools in a war zone. This principle highlights that systems with simple designs work better than their complicated alternatives. Simplicity must be one of the key goals when architecting for change to support software evolution.

Simplicity is also reflected in Occam's Razor, or the Law of Parsimony, as a principle related to problem solving. This principle states that if there are multiple hypotheses...