Fitness and Workout for Software Architecture

Most of the attention in software architecture is given to new styles (eg. microservices, serverless) or technology changes. Too little attention is given to the process of creating, evolving, and maintaining the architectural models and decisions. Yet this process is immensely valuable since with the right process you can adopt innumerable architectural styles and adapt to the challenges and constraints of your systems.

To help you improve your process, Alex will present three relatively new architecture practices you should try to include in your process:

• Architecture diagrams as code: instead of hand drawings or expensive tools, what if we go back to code in order to build our architectural diagrams?
• Architectural fitness functions: ensuring that the development team follows architectural guidelines such as “never call the data layer directly from the UI layer” has always been problematic, so how about solving these types of problems through automated checks?
• Architecture Decision Records (ADRs): do you remember why you made a certain trade-off two years ago? Will the team remember after the architect and half the team members leave? It’s probably best to store these decisions somehow, and ADRs are a possible solution.

Alex will examine the advantages and disadvantages of each technique, and answer your questions related to their adoption.