Agile software architecture
Modern Agile software development approaches like Scrum recommend a “just in time” vision of application development that tends to make people focus only on the activities that are directly useful for the current sprint. How can you include an activity with a long-term perspective like enterprise software architecture in the iterative process of Scrum?
The nice metaphor of technical debt introduced some 18 years ago by Ward Cunningham has slowly taken roots in our collective conceptual toolbox, as a nice way to express some of the pains that software projects suffer from. Most software developers who have had some experience with significant, long-lived projects can feel it, sometimes point to it, but more than often can’t do much about it.
Upfront Modeling is fine, documents describing the intended architecture are fine, and so forth. But the architecture, and our learning about it, can improve. Speculative software architecture should be made concrete and not of concrete.
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