The Frustrated Architect

Published December 8th, 2011 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it’s frustratingly neglected by many teams. Whether performed by one person or shared amongst the team, the architecture role exists on even the most agile of teams yet the balance of up front and evolutionary thinking often reflects aspiration rather than reality. Read more

Architect Role in Scrum

Published September 12th, 2011 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

This short video summarize a clinic held at the Scrum Gathering that took place in Amsterdam, November 2010 and where the question was “What is the role of Architects in Scrum?”.

Architecture in an Agile World

Published February 21st, 2011 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

There often seems to be a tension that surfaces between the process (that which guides us) and the execution (that which we do). Agility and architecture also play out in this same way, and it can be a very destructive. Yet, each side needs the other to exist. In this session, we will turn this tension into a powerful force that you can use to achieve a balance between keeping the problem and it’s solution under control.

Watch this video on oredev.org

Modularization, Testing and Technical Debt in a Large Agile Project

Published November 15th, 2010 Under Scrum, Software Testing | Leave a Comment

This experience reports focuses on the major scrum–related technical challenges that arose during a 120 000 hour scrum controlled project. For each of them, we try to identify the cause and the consequence, and then follow up with any solutions we tried. Finally we sum up and assess whether the problem was successfully solved or not.

Watch this streaming video from the Norwegian Developer Conference 2010

The DCI Architecture: Lean and Agile at the Code Level

Published August 30th, 2010 Under Coding, Lean | Leave a Comment

James Coplien explains the DCI (Data, Context, Interaction) paradigm used to better represent the user’s mental model in code through system state and behavior. Coplien makes an attempt to reintroduce architecture to Lean and Agile projects due to its value in sustaining high velocity and change resiliency.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-DCI-Architecture

Folding Together DDD and Agile

Published August 25th, 2010 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

After a decade of heavy process, the Agile revolution of the late ’90s threw off the dead hand of big upfront design. The bloody purge that followed was needed! There were unintended consequences. Too many teams interpret “Agile” as a permit to not think about design. But if they have ambitious goals, Agile teams need more than standup meetings and iterations. Many teams get off to a quick start, building lots of features in early iterations, but end up with a “Big Ball of Mud”. Without clear and well-structured code, they cannot sustain their pace and also put themselves at risk of, one day, encountering a critical feature they simply cannot deliver. Without the common understanding between developers and stakeholders that is forged in domain analysis, one of the greatest benefits of iteration, the deepening communication about what the software should do and how it should do it, is never realized. We must not return to the “Analysis Paralysis” but interpreting “Do the Simplest Thing” as “Do the Easiest Thing” doesn’t work either. This talk will consider ways of incorporating modeling and design into the iterative process in a lightweight way that increases communication with stakeholders and decreases the likelihood of painting ourselves into corners, without returning to the dead-hand of the analysis phase.

Watch this video on Skillsmatter.com

Philippe Kruchten on Architecture and Technical Debt

Published May 25th, 2010 Under Coding | Leave a Comment

Philippe Kruchten recently spoke at the SDC conference about the importance of architecture, the relationship between architecture and Agile methods and the impact of technical debt. He discusses a number of false dichotomies that have emerged between agility and discipline and agility and architecture. He emphasizes the importance of context in selecting a software development approach.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/philippe-kruchten-technical-debt

Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth

Published January 22nd, 2010 Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

In the course of six months IMVU’s user base quadrupled in size. At the start of this period we were bottlenecked on a single central database. During these six months we evolved IMVU’s architecture to use caching with memcached, replication, horizontal and vertical partitioning to support this growth. We’ll look specifically at implementing horizontal partitioning in a way that makes writing scalable application code easy for non-DB experts. We will focus on the techniques used to incrementally add scalability without having to make large changes to the application layer or disrupt ongoing feature development by the rest of the team.

Watch this video on Oredev.org

Talking Architects with Len Bass

Published November 11th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Quality Attributes (Non-functional requirements) as first class citizens of a project? Too far fetched? Len Bass, co-author of Software Architecture in Practice and longstanding member of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), thinks he has an answer. But how does this fit in an agile world?


Get Microsoft Silverlight

Agile Architecture, with an Update

Published August 27th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

James “Cope” Coplien has long been speaking about the need to maintain good but lightweight architectural practices in an Agile setting, and points to both industry experience and formal studies that support this position. Cope will talk in general about winning strategies that amplify the Agile values through good architectural practice. In the in-depth seminar that follows, Cope will cover these techniques in a bit more depth. He will also describe recent work with Trygve Reenskaug that looks closely about how to capture the structure of Use Cases directly in an OO architecture, and about when and how to do that.

keep looking »