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

Documenting quality attributes

Quality starts from an accurate, structured, and consistent definition of quality attributes. Quality attributes are long-living representations useful for continuous improvements even after systems are deployed in production. Therefore, quality attributes have to be systematically maintained with periodic reviews.

Mannion and Keepence recommend using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realizable, Traceable) model to capture measurable quality attributes with a high degree of accuracy without ambiguity. In this section, we discuss various SMART approaches for documenting quality attributes.

Using the scaled Agile approach for specifying quality attributes

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) uses NFRs as a terminology instead of quality attributes. The framework recommends defining NFRs within a bounded context, as independent as possible, negotiable, and testable. SAFe proposes a model as shown in the following diagram for describing NFRs...