software architecture
Dan Hockenmaier on Substack
substack.com
Org debt is just as dangerous as tech debt but is talked about much less
Org debt builds up every time a company operates without discipline:
- Inconsistent principles for promotions and comp
- Hiring without a clear scope for the new role
- Trying new operating models but not sticking to them
- Allowing meeting creep
In the short term, it's always easier to just let this stuff happen. But in the long term, org debt will destroy a company. Execution will slow down, people will get frustrated, and the best ones will leave.
If you're considering joining a company, assess org discipline in the same way you'd assess their metrics and team.
The benefits of incremental development include a reduction of the potential risk in the project. If the architecture is for a family of related systems, the infrastructure can be reused across the family, lowering the per-system cost of each.
Rick Kazman • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
enabling incremental development
This practice gained attention in the early 2000s through the ideas of Alistair Cockburn and his notion of a “walking skeleton.” More recently, it has been adopted by those employing MVP (minimum viable product) as a strategy for risk reduction.
Paul Clements • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
enabling incremental development
The fidelity of the system increases as extensions are added, or early versions are replaced by more complete versions of these parts of the software. In some cases, the parts may be low-fidelity versions or prototypes of the final functionality; in other cases, they may be surrogates that consume and produce data at the appropriate rates but do li... See more
Paul Clements • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
enabling incremental development
Many systems are built as skeletal systems that can be extended using plug-ins, packages, or extensions. Examples include the R language, Visual Studio Code, and most web browsers.
Rick Kazman • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
enabling incremental development
Once an architecture has been defined, it can serve as the basis for incremental development. The first increment can be a skeletal system in which at least some of the infrastructure—how the elements initialize, communicate, share data, access resources, report errors, log activity, and so forth—is present, but much of the system’s application fun... See more
Paul Clements • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
enabling incremental development
once the architecture has been agreed upon, it becomes very costly—for managerial and business reasons—to significantly modify it. This is one argument (among many) for analyzing the software architecture for a large system before settling on a specific choice.
Paul Clements • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
influences on organizational structure
If you want your implementation to conform to an architecture, then it must conform to the design decisions prescribed by the architecture. It must have the set of elements prescribed by the architecture, these elements must interact with each other in the fashion prescribed by the architecture, and each element must fulfill its responsibility to t... See more
Paul Clements • Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition
architecture should prescibe constraints on implementation