Analyzing Architecture

Analyzing architecture is all about finding structural decay in applications and systems to determine whether the architecture is still satisfying the business concerns (performance, scalability, fault tolerance, availability, and so on) and also whether the architecture supporting the application functionality is still viable. This is known as “architectural vitality”. While the functionality of a system may be sound, the architecture supporting that functionality may not be. For example, performance and scalability may have been the number one concern 5 years ago, but today agility, testability, and deployability is the number one concern to support high levels of competitive advantage and time-to-market. Does the architecture support these “-ilities”? If not, the company is likely to fail in today’s highly competitive market.

In this intense 1-day hands-on workshop you will learn what structural decay means and how to detect it. You will also learn what it means to “analyze an architecture”, and how to measure and quantify various “-ilities” such as performance, scalability, testability, maintainability, and so on. Leveraging source code metrics and open-source analysis tools, you will then see how to apply micro-level (source code) analysis techniques to identify decay in your architecture. You will also learn how to perform risk analysis against your architecture to help identify and prioritize architectural refactoring efforts, and also how to assess the level of modularity in your application in preparation for the move to microservices.

While the analysis techniques taught in this class are largely platform and technology-agnostic, most of the analysis tools we will be using will be in Java.

Requirements
A laptop is recommended for this workshop so you can follow along with the class exercises.

Prerequisites
The desire to find out whether you have a sound and viable architecture supporting your systems and applications. There are no technical or architectural prerequisites for the class.