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

Developing quality attributes

Once the architecture decisions are made, the next step is to make that decision ready for the teams to implement. Pushing quality attributes to teams for development and compliance is a big challenge and is one of the most debated points in the Agile software development community.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for this challenge; however, a combination of the following three approaches helps in overcoming this challenge:

  • Technical backlog items: Some of the quality attributes need specific work from the team, such as developing a replication solution for the database or building the high availability of microservices. Such scenarios are converted and captured as user stories.
  • Backlog constraints: In most cases, once the base solution is available, such as high availability or a shared data cache for faster customer access, several other user stories need to comply with the solution. In those cases, constraints such as acceptance...