Steering Agile Architecture

Einleitung

„Emerge your architecture“ goes the agile mantra and with it developers get empowered and fluffy papers make room for real code. But, how do you ensure the cohesiveness of the result? Yes, testing and code reviews are useful tools, but the challenge of working with software systems stems from their sheer size and their continuously shape changing nature. The system’s architecture is a business asset as it can make or break a system in the long run. Thus, keeping track of what goes on in the system is critical. This is a course about knowing the real architecture of your software system, and choosing to how to steer based on that reality. 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. A longer version of the course was published by O’Reilly as a video course in April 2017. The course is based on the extensive experience of the author on developing and practicing the humane assessment method and it is backed up by almost a decade of concrete case studies.

Programm

1.  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 requirements Architecture and testing Architecture and pair programming Architecture and code review Architecture and code reading – Architecture and agile development: Architecture as an emergent property Emergent properties and complex (as different from complicated) games
2. 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
3.  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

Kursziel

Learn how to deal with architecture in a software development project developed with agility.

Adressaten

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.

Voraussetzungen

Have experience with working in a team of 5 people or more for more than 1 year.

Infrastruktur

Bitte bringen Sie einen Laptop mit.