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 Database | 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 General | 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?
Agile Architecture, with an Update
Published August 27th, 2009 Under General | 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.
Agile and Architecture
Published August 20th, 2009 Under General | Leave a Comment
Interesting things happen when you put the words “Agile” and “Architecture” in the same sentence. Some would say that they have nothing to do with each other, others would say that effectiveness in one precludes effectiveness in the other. Still others would say “look, a squirrel”, but we’re not going to worry about them right now. Rather than wander aimlessly through the vast domains of knowledge that both agile and software architecture imply, the goal of this session is to distill each down to a level where we can observe first-hand the impact that architectural decisions have on our ability to iteratively develop software over time, and vice versa. We will accomplish this by using an iterative exercise as a framework to construct and evolve a generalized application architecture.
Persons attending this session need not be either Agile or Architecture experts, but an interest in both is an absolute requirement. Ideally attendees will be familiar with the common abstractions of complex software applications such as user interfaces, business logic, communication protocols, API’s, frameworks, persistence mechanisms and so forth, but if you are not, we’ll be sure to group you with someone who is so you won’t miss the fun. At the end of this session attendees should walk out with not one, but two shiny new skills – first is an increased knowledge of both the cost of investment and the price of change at various layers of application architecture. Second is a new sense of “smell” that will help you to detect when an architectural investment is needed, or when too much has been or is being invested.
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