Building Evolutionary Architectures: Principles & Practices • Rebecca Parsons • YOW! 2022

This presentation was recorded at YOW! 2022. #GOTOcon #YOW
yowcon.com
Rebecca Parsons - CTO at Thoughtworks @thoughtworks
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ABSTRACT
With technology, business models and business needs changing so rapidly, an adaptable architecture is critical to allow systems to cope with change. Historically, adaptability has been sought through anticipating the places where a system must be adaptable and through various architectural approaches. However, recent experiences have shown these approaches to be inadequate, at least as currently practiced.
This talk presents some principles of evolutionary architecture that allow systems to respond to change without needing to predict the future. We then briefly describe approaches that realize these principles and discuss how these approaches support adaptability of systems in an evolutionary way. [...]
TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
02:56 What is evolutionary architecture?
15:55 Principles
23:44 Techniques
29:30 Evolvability & experimentation
34:18 Governance
37:30 Mechanics
44:22 Outro
44:58 Q&A
Download slides and read the full abstract here:
yowcon.com/sydney-2022/sessio...
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ford, Parsons, Kua & Sadalage • Building Evolutionary Architectures 2nd Edition • amzn.to/3lqr5Q8
Ford, Richards, Sadalage & Dehghani • Software Architecture: The Hard Parts • amzn.to/3QeMgjR
Mark Richards & Neal Ford • Fundamentals of Software Architecture • amzn.to/3wMBhoI
Ford, Parsons & Kua • Building Evolutionary Architectures • amzn.to/3l0IOh2
Neal Ford • Functional Thinking • amzn.to/3l6ND8M
Michael Feathers • Working Effectively with Legacy Code • amzn.to/3ZFQoMU
Christian Clausen • Five Lines of Code • amzn.to/3s2zjyg
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#SoftwareArchitecture #SoftwareEngineering #EvolutionaryArchitecture #Connascence #FitnessFunctions #Thoughtworks #Coupling #LooseCoupling #ComputerScience #RebeccaParsons #Programming #ArchitectureQuantum #Evolvability #PostelsLaw #Postel #ContractTesting #Microservices
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[@AtulVinayakS]

Buzzword salad

[@Reflekt0r]

Could be worse

[@otniel2663]

what is your point?

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

You'd have to be a person who eats your vegetables to be able to understand it.

[@nyrtzi]

Yes, anyone from Thoughtworks will use plenty of buzzwords. They are the original source for some of them that being the case I don't think she's saying anything we haven't really heard before but just summarizing the same old.
1) postpone big decisions if you can until you know better
2) ease of change, the ability to deploy without huge pain and talk about the system with biz people, etc. all depend on ease of understanding
3) put tests where they can tell you if you're breaking someone else's code
4) don't focus on that which is most broken, focus on what's costing you the most in terms of sleep or velocity
5) talk to business people in their own language so they can understand why what you're saying is important to them too
So all in all very familiar common sense stuff.

[@Rope257]

​@@nyrtziWhile this may be the same old for some, this definitely isn't the case for others. For example, I work for a client which insists on not making changes to the architecture as described after implementation has started. I.e. they are not allowing any significant changes because they are highly risk-averse. Watching videos like these gives me new ideas on how to conver the intentions behind allowing changes in your architecture and why this is important. Sometimes its not "what" people are saying, but "how" they're saying it.
As for the "buzzwords". I didn't hear any buzzwords in this talk. Only words that carry a very specific and applicable meaning in the context they are meant to address.