Neal Ford

Building Evolutionary Architectures Workshop

Monday, 9:00 AM EST

This workshop highlights the ideas from the forthcoming Building Evolutionary Architectures, showing how to build architectures that evolve gracefully over time.

An evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change across multiple dimensions.

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later”. But then microservices showed that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. This workshop, based on my upcoming book, investigates the family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, along with how to build evolvable systems. Understanding how to evolve architecture requires understanding how different parts of architecture interact; I describe how to achieve appropriate coupling between components and services. Incremental change is critical for the mechanics of evolution; I cover how to build engineering and DevOps practices to support continuous change. Uncontrolled evolution leads to undesirable side effects; I cover how fitness functions build protective, testable scaffolding around critical parts to guide the architecture as it evolves.

The software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium, where any new tool, framework, or technique leads to disruption and the establishment of a new equilibrium. Predictability is impossible when the foundation architects plan against changes constantly in unexpected ways. Instead, prefer evolvability over predictability. This hands-on workshop provides a high-level overview of a different way to think about software architecture.

Outline:

• Architecture Dimensions
• Engineering Incremental change
• Architectural Characteristics
• Exercise: determine appropriate characteristics
• Identifying Architectural Patterns
• Exercise: components and patterns
• Identifying Fitness Functions
• Exercise: determining fitness functions
• Retrofitting Existing Architectures
• Building Evolvable Architectures

Stories Every Developer Should Know

Tuesday, 8:30 PM EST

Stories and lessons from architecture, design, process, and other sources, each illustrating important principles and pitfalls for modern architects.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  –George Santayana

The past is never dead. It's not even past. –William Faulkner

Most developers pursue the Latest and Greatest with intense fervor, yet the history of engineering, including software projects, contains rich lessons that we risk repeating ad nauseam. This session recounts a variety of stories of projects that failed architecturally…and why. Ranging from the Vasa in 1628 to Knight Capital in 2012, each story tells of a mistaken interpretation of some architectural fundamental principle and the consequences–some good, some less so. I I also look at the common threads for these stories, which resonates with problems many companies have but don't realize.

• Pets. Com
• San Francisco project
• The Vasa
• F16
• Sagrada Familia
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge
• null
• Ada
• Serialization
• Knight Capital
• Ariane 5
• Webvan
• Chandler project

Continuous Delivery for Architects Workshop

Wednesday, 1:30 PM EST

Architecture doesn't exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery.

Yesterday's best practice is tomorrow's anti-pattern. Architecture doesn't exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery. I first set context for the information you must master before delving into the nuances of modern architectural concerns. I discuss the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce intra-component/service coupling, the tension between coupling and cohesion, microservices architectures, and other engineering techniques.

This workshop allows you to apply techniques either against a sample codebase…or bring one of your own. Suggested exercises include using metrics to learn more about the structure of your class, how to determine how to partition a mono-lithic architecture into a service-based ond, and Architectural Katas with Devops added.

Continuous Delivery for Architects Workshop

Wednesday, 3:15 PM EST

Architecture doesn't exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery.

Yesterday's best practice is tomorrow's anti-pattern. Architecture doesn't exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery. I first set context for the information you must master before delving into the nuances of modern architectural concerns. I discuss the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce intra-component/service coupling, the tension between coupling and cohesion, microservices architectures, and other engineering techniques.

This workshop allows you to apply techniques either against a sample codebase…or bring one of your own. Suggested exercises include using metrics to learn more about the structure of your class, how to determine how to partition a mono-lithic architecture into a service-based ond, and Architectural Katas with Devops added.

Documenting and Presenting Software Architectures

Wednesday, 5:00 PM EST

This session covers two critical soft skills for architects:

• creating clear, concise documentation of software architecture, both structure and decisions
• presenting architectural ideas as clearly as possible

New architects find soft skills like creating lucid documentation and building compelling presentations challenging. This presentation covers a variety of ways to document ideas in software architecture, ranging from diagramming techniques (that aren't UML) to Architecture Decisions Records and ultimately to presentations. The second part of the talk leverages patterns and anti-patterns from the Presentation Patterns book to help architects build clear and concise representations of their ideas.

Comparing Service-based Architectures

Thursday, 9:00 AM EST

This session compares Service-oriented, Service-based, and Micro-service architectures, describing the problem each is designed to solve, differences and similarities, variants and hybrids, and engineering practices.

Microservice architectures are quite popular, described as “SOA done correctly”. But what are the real differences between SOA, Microservice, and service-based architectures? What about middle ground between the shared everything of SOA versus shared nothing of microservices? This talk explores the similarities and differences between various service-oriented architectural styles. I describe the characteristics of SOA, microservices, and hybrid service-based architectures, along with the considerations and constraints for each. I also discuss specific engineering practices, orchestration styles, reuse strategies, and migrating from monolithic applications to service-based or microservice architectures. No one architecture can solve every problem, and many projects take on more complexity than necessary by choosing the wrong paradigm.

Building Evolutionary Architectures

Thursday, 10:45 AM EST

An evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change along multiple dimensions.

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later”. But then microservices showed that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. This talk, based on my upcoming book, investigates the family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, along with how to build evolvable systems. Understanding how to evolve architecture requires understanding how architectural dimensions interact; I describe how to achieve appropriate coupling between components and services. Incremental change is critical for the mechanics of evolution; I cover how to build engineering and DevOps practices to support continuous change. Uncontrolled evolution leads to undesirable side effects; I cover how fitness functions build protective, testable scaffolding around critical parts to guide the architecture as it evolves.

The software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium, where any new tool, framework, or technique leads to disruption and the establishment of a new equilibrium. Predictability is impossible when the foundation architects plan against changes constantly in unexpected ways. Instead, prefer evolvability over predictability. This keynote illustrates how to achieve evolutionary architectures and how to retrofit existing systems to support better evolution.

Build Your Own Technology Radar Workshop for Architects

Thursday, 1:30 PM EST

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company. This talk discusses using the radar for personal breadth development, architectural guidance, and governance.

ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board creates a “technology radar” twice a year, a working document that helps the company make decisions about interesting technologies and where we spend our time. ThoughtWorks then started conducting radar-building exercises for our clients, which provides a great medium for technologists company-wide to express their opinions about the technologies they use every day. For companies, creating a radar helps you document your technology decisions in a standard format, evaluate technology decisions in an actionable way, and create cross-silo discussions about suitable technology choices. This session describes the radar visualization and how to conduct a radar building session for yourself. After a brief introduction, the bulk of the workshop consists of attendees building a radar for the group, following the same procedure you'll use when you do this exercise at your company. At the end, we'll have created a unique Radar for this event and practiced doing it for yourself.

Build Your Own Technology Radar Workshop for Architects

Thursday, 3:15 PM EST

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company. This talk discusses using the radar for personal breadth development, architectural guidance, and governance.

ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board creates a “technology radar” twice a year, a working document that helps the company make decisions about interesting technologies and where we spend our time. ThoughtWorks then started conducting radar-building exercises for our clients, which provides a great medium for technologists company-wide to express their opinions about the technologies they use every day. For companies, creating a radar helps you document your technology decisions in a standard format, evaluate technology decisions in an actionable way, and create cross-silo discussions about suitable technology choices. This session describes the radar visualization and how to conduct a radar building session for yourself. After a brief introduction, the bulk of the workshop consists of attendees building a radar for the group, following the same procedure you'll use when you do this exercise at your company. At the end, we'll have created a unique Radar for this event and practiced doing it for yourself.