Software Engineering Radio – Episode 236 – Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture

http://www.se-radio.net/2015/08/se-radio-episode-236-rebecca-parsons-on-evolutionary-architecture/

Parsons then describes five principles of evolutionary architecture

• last responsible moment
• architect and develop for evolvability
• Postel’s law
• Be a tolerant reader, as long as the message contains the information you need, ignore the rest.
• Be a responsible writer, really think about, what you put in a message, because when the message is in the wild, people might rely on specific information in the message.
• architect for testability
• When you architect for testability, changes are, you get a good architecture.
• Conway’s law
• An organization will design software systems that represent their own communication systems, in other words, the system will be as good as the people are communicating within the organization.

Some side nodes

• Don’t divide people in silo’s of techniques / layers, so don’t create front-end, back-end, database groups, but divide people’s in functional groups. This does not mean there are no specialist, you need specialist, but the majority of the simple tasks can be executed by non specialist, while the specialist can concentrate on the hard techniques problems.
• What is architecture: architecture is all the things that people perceive as hard to change – Martin Fowler in Who Needs an Architect