One of the things that I try and do to further my personal development is to read at least one new business or technical book every month. About 6 months ago, I read To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About moving Others. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the most useful book I read in 2013. Basically, the premise of the book is that most people are in the business of sales; or at least persuasion. Your job may not be to get people to sign on the dotted line, but most knowledge worker professions are about convincing people of something. That’s certainly true about project kickoffs and architecture meetings. The whole purpose of that kind of meeting is to come up with a plan, get people invested in the plan and start the project off in a positive direction.
One of my personal project that started off as a thought experiment is slowly turning into reality. One of the ideas was to see what would happen if I turned up all the best practices to 11 and see what happened. The other part of it was that it was an excuse to use some technologies that I wasn’t that familiar with and learn something new. There were a couple of surprises, some of them very pleasant. Among them was how much starting load and performance testing early impacted the architecture of the project.
I got asked recently about the role of architecture in agile development. Basically, the question boils down to some variation of “Is there a place for architecture in agile development?” This is a common and mostly misunderstood question. It seems like it gets asked on every project. It’s based on a faulty assumption: that architecture is something that is stand alone, that can be bolted on to a project.
To talk about agile architecture, you first need to understand what architecture is. Once you know what architecture is, and what it isn’t, the question changes to “How can you do good architecture in agile development?”
I just went to a training class, the first formal training class that I’ve gone to in years. Advanced Distributed Systems Design using SOA & DDD
To say my mind was blown is an understatement. It’s the entire contents for a semester long class in system architecture condensed into a five day span. It was the equivalent of trying to drink from the fire hose, far to much, far too fast to really take it all in.
Scott's Thoughts 