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

Discovering and refining quality attributes

Unlike business requirements, it is implausible to expect to receive accurate quality needs and expectations from the business stakeholders. Hence, focused attention led by architects to discover quality requirements is an absolute necessity. The discovery of quality attributes broadly consists of identifying stakeholders, conducting QAWs, and refining QASes. The following sections cover these in detail, starting with capturing the stakeholder matrix.

Aligning stakeholders to quality attributes

The stakeholder matrix is an immensely useful tool for understanding stakeholder needs, performing trade-off analysis, determining the impact of architecture decisions, and mitigating potential risks. It is also incredibly powerful for architects to understand, communicate, and negotiate quality attributes with relevant stakeholders. The stakeholder matrix is generally captured once at the beginning and revisited in every iteration as required...