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

Managing tech debt

Ward Cunningham, who introduced the term tech debts, used a bank analogy to explain tech debts, which appeared in the OOPSLA 92 Experience Report–The WyCash Portfolio Management System. He observed that creating debt is like not repaying a loan. One or two missed payments is fine, but longer than that will lead to an irrecoverable situation.

There are genuine tech debts and manufactured tech debts. Genuine tech debts are to support the business to meet sudden customer needs. On the other hand, manufactured debts are due to architecture erosion, lack of knowledge of people, lack of motivation, lack of discipline, the urgency of now, the pressure of delivery, lack of intent to do the right thing, lack of focus on architecture and design, and so on.

Robert C. Martin observed in his article A Mess is not a Technical Debt that in acceptable tech debt situations, decisions are taken in an informed way by properly analyzing trade-offs with a true intention...