Ford Neal, Parsons Rebecca, Kua Patrick. Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change

O’Reilly Media, 2017. — 332 p. — ISBN10: 1491986360; ISBN13: 978-1-491-98636-3.The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.Review
This book is packed with nomenclatures and deliberate practices that will significantly benefit anyone in the role of an architect. Wish I had this in my hands decades ago, glad its here now.--Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, award winning author and founder of Agile Developer, Inc.Software development has changed in recent years, from long release cycles characterised by up-front planning, to the development of software in small valuable increments that deliver value quickly, allowing changes in direction in response to the experience gained from early delivery. In this book, Neal, Rebecca and Pat draw on their extensive experience to explain how to create architectures that can enable constant change, by evolving throughout the lifetime of the system. It is a valuable guide for any software architect who needs to support the rapid delivery of valuable software.
--Eoin Woods, EndavaThe timely "Building Evolutionary Architectures" sits at the intersection of two key trends in the software industry. At one hand software engineers face increasing demand for delivery and quality at 'Internet' pace and scale. The only way to address this is to build evolving architectures. We do not have all the answers at the beginning, nor do we have time to find all the answers. At the same time, the role of the software architect is changing. They are increasingly becoming hands on members of highly effective product teams, instead of a separate group making the 'big decisions'. The book not only addresses these points, but is also full of pragmatic and insightful advice. A great read for all software engineers and architects.
--Murat ErderNeal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. Check out his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer. She has more years of application development experience than she cares to admit, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems.Patrick is a Tech Principal and Generalising Specialist at ThoughtWorks. He is the author of "The Retrospective Handbook" and "Talking with Tech Leads." His passion is bringing. a balanced focus on people, organisation and technology. He has over a decade of experience in agile and lean development processes.For a long time, the software industry followed the notion that architecture was something that ought to be developed and completed before writing the first line of code. Inspired by the construction industry, it was felt that the sign of a successful software architecture was something that didn’t need to change during development, often a reaction to the high costs of scrap and rework that would occur due to a re-architecture event.
This vision of architecture was rudely challenged by the rise of agile software methods. The pre-planned architecture approach was founded on the notion that requirements should also be fixed before coding began, leading to a phased (or waterfall) approach where requirements was followed by architecture which itself was followed by construction (programming). The agile world, however, challenged the very notion of fixed requirements, observing that regular changes in requirements were a business necessity in the modern world, and providing project planning techniques to embrace controlled change.
In this new agile world, many people questioned the role of architecture. And certainly the pre-planned architecture vision couldn’t fit in with modern dynamism. But there is another approach to architecture, one that embraces change in the agile manner. In this view architecture is an constant effort, one that works closely with programming so that architecture can react both to changing requirements but also to feedback from programming. We’ve come to call this evolutionary architecture, to highlight that while the changes are unpredictable, the architecture can still move in a good direction.
At ThoughtWorks, we’ve been immersed in this architectural world-view. Rebecca led many of our most important projects in the early years of this millenium, and developed our technical leadership as our CTO. Neal has been a careful observer of our work, synthesizing and conveying the lessons we’ve learned. Pat has combined his project work with developing our technical leads. We’ve always felt that architecture is vitally important, and can’t be left to idle chance. We’ve made mistakes, but learned from them, growing a better understanding of how to build a code base that can respond gracefully to the many changes in its purpose.
The heart of doing evolutionary architecture is to make small changes, and put in feedback loops that allow everyone to learn from how the system is developing. The rise of Continuous Delivery has been a crucial enabling factor in making evolutionary architecture practical. The authorial trio use the notion of fitness functions to monitor the state of the architecture. They explore different styles of evolvability for architecture, and put emphasis on the issues around long-lived data — often a topic that gets neglected. Conway’s Law towers over much of the discussion, as it should.
While I’m sure we have much to learn about doing software architecture in an evolutionary style, this book marks an essential road map on the current state of understanding. As more people are realizing the central role of software systems in our twenty-first century human world, knowing how best to respond to change while keeping on your feet will be an essential skill for any software leader.1. Software Architecture
2. Fitness Functions
3. Engineering Incremental Change
4. Architectural Coupling
5. Evolutionary Data
6. Building Evolvable Architectures
7. Evolutionary Architecture Pitfalls and Antipatterns
8. Putting Evolutionary Architecture into Practice