Topics:
Agile architecture
Visualization
Architecture testing
Process
Description
The architecture of the system is important and it deserves special attention because it is too easy for it to go wrong in the long run, and it is too expensive when that happens. In this course, we take a systematic look at what architecture is, and we detail a method of approaching the challenge of steering it on a daily basis through:
- making architectural concerns explicit,
- crafting automated checkers,
- agreeing on findings, and
- distilling corrective actions.
This approach requires the team to build custom tools and use them to guide decisions actively. This requires new skills and an appropriate technical infrastructure. However, this is a technical detail. The critical benefit comes from making architectural decisions explicit, and from the daily actions of cleaning the state of the system.
Target audience
Steering agile architecture is a challenge regardless of the type of system or chosen architecture and it should concern everyone involved in building the system. That is why, this course is targeted to both engineers and managers. We cover the multiple facets of the process, and we accompany the conceptual descriptions with real life examples from multiple case studies.
Course outline - Approaching architecture
What is software architecture:
- Paper architecture vs. real architecture
- When is architecture important?
- Who should care about architecture?
- Architecture and architects
- Architecture and testing
- Architecture and pair programming
- Architecture and code review
- Architecture and agile development
Architecture as an emergent property
- Emergent properties and complex (as different from complicated) games
- Growing architecture
Architecture and technical debt
- Architecture and quality
- The benefits and limitations of the technical debt metaphor
- Beyond technical debt: software habitability as a positive metaphor
Architecture as a collaboration
- Architecture as a commons
- Architecture as a work in progress
- Architecture as a negotiation
- Small fixes and long term goals
The daily assessment game
- The roles: stakeholder and facilitator
- Integrating daily assessment in the development process
- Dealing with the queue of technical tasks
- Examples of daily group decisions and actions
- Exposing architecture
Detecting and testing architecture drifts
- The limited impact of out-of-the-box detections
- The need for contextual detection
- Testing architecture
- Hypothesizing and the humane assessment method of crafting custom tools during development
Introduction in software analysis
- Overview of what software analysis is and how it helps software architecture
- How developers already unknowingly know software analysis
- Code as data
- Beyond basic code structure: annotations, configurations, tests etc.
- How to think of analyses: static vs. dynamic, history vs. one version, code vs. bytecode, metrics vs. queries vs. visualizations
- Software in pictures
What is information and software visualization?
- Principles of visualization
- Visualizing software systems
- Visualization as a transformation
- Visualization as an opportunity
- Combining queries and visualizations
