For those of you following the agile architecture series, you may know that I’ve been working with Ryan Martens, Rally’s CTO and founder, and Mauricio Zamora, from CSG Systems, to put our thoughts on agile, intentional architecture into whitepaper form. Rally has given a big assist to the production and publishing process and I’m happy to announce that the final whitepaper, Principles of Agile Architecture: Intentional Architecture in Enterprise-Class Systems: is now on line at the Rally Knowledge Portal. There’s lots of other enterprise-level content there as well so it’s well worth the simple registration.
For context, here’s an extract:
“In this paper we’ll discuss the role of “Intentional Architecture” in the development of enterprise-class systems built using agile methods and techniques. In order to gain a better understanding of this important practice, we’ll describe:
• The context and challenges of large-scale system architecture in Agile development
• The need for Intentional Architecture to buttress emerging architecture
• How the traditional systems architect can contribute to Agile teams”
The paper goes on ……
” There are a number of governing principles teams can apply to the challenge of architecture development in large-scale systems. These governing principles are:
Principle #1 The teams that code the system design the system.
Principle #2 Build the simplest architecture that can possibly work.
Principle #3 When in doubt, code it out.
Principle #4 They build it, they test it.
Principle #5 The bigger the system, the longer the runway.
Principle #6 System architecture is a role collaboration.
Principle #7 There is no monopoly on innovation.”
If you are building big systems, I think you’ll find it interesting reading.
Scaling Software Agility 