Building evolutionary architectures

from Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons & Patrick Kua

Pitch

Support Constant Change

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.

Notes

Evolutionary architecture

• Other possible names ?

  • Agile

  • Incremental

  • Continual

  • ...

• Incremental and Guided

  • Some objective exists Move towards

Fitness functions

• From genetic algorithm to define success

• "An architectural fitness function provides an objective integrity assessment of some characteristics"

• System wide fitness function

  • Collection of fitness functions

    • Architecture metrics

    • Integrations tests

    • Unit tests

    • Contract Tests

    • Monitors

    • ...

• Categories

  • Atomic

    • Run against a singular context

    • Exercise 1 particular aspect

    • Unit test for example

  • Holistic

    • Shared context

  • Triggered

  • Continual

Mind map