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

Learnings from Snow in the Desert

Snow in the Desert started their Agile transformation journey with a textbook adoption of SAFe. At Snow in the Desert, behavior and culture were the most significant barriers to Agile delivery. As per SAFe, the system architect was positioned at the ART leadership level alongside product management and the release train engineer. Although architects are the best programmers, the behavior of individuals and memories of past organization developed friction between Agile architects and the rest of the development teams. This wall of distinction diminished collaboration, causing teams to operate with no shared responsibilities and no alignment with the solution vision.

To overcome this challenge, Snow in the Desert course-corrected their team constructs. The following diagram shows the next evolution of Snow in the Desert:

Figure 3.16 – Architect assignments at Snow in the Desert

As shown in the diagram, the system architects...