Neal Ford

Software Architecture Fundamentals

Monday, 9:00 AM EST

The job Software Architect places in the top ten of most annual surveys of best jobs, yet no clear path exists from Developer to Architect. Why aren’t there more books and training materials to fill this demand? First, software architecture is a massive multidisciplinary subject, covering many roles and responsibilities, making it difficult to teach because so much context is required for the interesting subjects. Second, it’s a fast moving discipline, where entire suites of best practices become obsolete overnight. This workshop provides the fundamentals to transition from developer to architect, or to help “accidental” architects.

Part 1 of this workshop focuses on the many elements required to make the journey from developer to architect, covering process topics like the impact of Continuous Delivery on architecture, technical subjects like application, integration, and enterprise architecture, and soft skills. While we can’t make you an architect overnight, we can start you on the journey with a map and a good compass.
Part 1, From Developer to Architect, covers:

• Soft skills
• Continuous Delivery
• Understanding large codebases
• Architecture patterns
• Architecture anti-patterns
• Integration architecture overview
• Introduction to enterprise architecture

Part two of this workshop takes a deeper dive in application, integration, and enterprise architecture topics, including evaluating architectures via Agile ATAM, the impacts of continuous delivery on architecture, comparing architectures, SOA, SOAP, and REST, integration hubs, and enterprise architecture approaches and strategies.

Part 2, Deeper Dive, covers:

• Continuous Delivery for architects
• Applying abstraction
• Comparing architectures
• SOAP vs REST/ WS vs Messaging
• Integration hubs
• Enterprise architecture approaches and strategies
• Comparing service-based architectures

To fully leverage knowledge, you need application. The last part of this workshop uses the public domain Architectural Katas exercise to apply learnings from the first two parts.

Continuous Delivery Workshop, part 1 of 3: Deployment Pipelines

Tuesday, 8:30 AM EST

The first part of the Continuous Delivery workshop covers the differences between continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery). It also introduces the deployment pipeline_, along with usage, patterns, and anti-patterns. This part concludes with some applied engineering principles.

Releasing software to actual users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. The workshop materials are derived from the best selling book Continuous Delivery and creating in collaboration with the authors and other of my ThoughtWorks colleagues. Continuous Delivery details how to get fast feedback on the production readiness of your application every time there is a change—to code, infrastructure, or configuration.

The first part of the workshop describes the technical differences between related topics such as continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery. At the heart of the workshop is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. I discuss the various stages, how triggering works, patterns and anti-patterns, and how to pragmatically determine what “production ready” means. This session also covers some agile principles espoused by the Continuous Delivery book, including new perspectives on things like developer workstations and configuration management.

Continuous Delivery Workshop, part 2 of 3: Testing, Synergistic Practices, and Deployment

Tuesday, 10:30 AM EST

Continuous Delivery relies on a variety of interlocking engineering practices to work efficiently; this session covers three related topics. First, I cover the role of testing and the testing quadrant. Second, I specifically cover version control usage and offer alternatives to feature branching like toggle and branch by abstraction. Third, I describe some incremental release strategies, along with their impact on other stages of project lifecycle.

Releasing software to actual users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. The workshop materials are derived from the best selling book Continuous Delivery and creating in collaboration with the authors and other of my ThoughtWorks colleagues. Continuous Delivery details how to get fast feedback on the production readiness of your application every time there is a change—to code, infrastructure, or configuration.

Continuous Delivery relies on a variety of interlocking engineering practices to work efficiently; this session covers three related topics. First, I cover the role of testing and the testing quadrant, including the audience and engineering practices around different types of tests. I also cover some best practices around testing, including testing ratios, code coverage, and other topics. Second, I specifically cover version control usage and offer alternatives to feature branching like toggle and branch by abstraction. Generally, I talk about building synergistic engineering practices that complement rather than conflict one another. In particular, I discuss why feature branching harms three other engineering practices and describe alternatives. Third, I describe some incremental release strategies, along with their impact on other stages of project lifecycle.

Continuous Delivery Workshop, part 3 of 3: Infrastructure and Data

Tuesday, 1:30 PM EST

Two big stumbling blocks for Continuous Delivery adaptation are interactions with operations and the keepers of data. First in this session, I cover operations, DevOps, and programmatic control of infrastructure. Second, I discuss how to incorporate databases and DBA's into the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process.

Releasing software to actual users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. The workshop materials are derived from the best selling book Continuous Delivery and creating in collaboration with the authors and other of my ThoughtWorks colleagues. Continuous Delivery details how to get fast feedback on the production readiness of your application every time there is a change—to code, infrastructure, or configuration.

Two big stumbling blocks for Continuous Delivery adaptation are interactions with operations and the keepers of data. First in this session, I cover operations, DevOps, and programmatic control of infrastructure using tools like Puppet and Chef. I also discuss the explosion of tool alternatives in this space, and cover some current-day best practices. Second, I discuss how to incorporate databases and DBA's into the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process. This includes database migrations, strategies for enhancing collaboration between application development and data, and database refactoring techniques.

Build Your Own Technology Radar Workshop for Architects

Tuesday, 8:00 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.

Building Microservice Architectures

Wednesday, 9:00 AM EST

Inspired by success stories from companies such as Amazon and Netflix, many organizations are moving towards microservice architectures at a brisk pace. This session provides a thorough overview of the pros and cons for microservice architectures, when it is applicable, and some nascent best practices.

Microservice architecture is important because it’s the first architecture to fully embrace the Continuous Delivery and DevOps revolutions. In this session, I cover the motivations for building a microservice architecture (including making the distinction between “regular SOA” and microservices), some considerations you must make before starting (such as transactions versus eventual consistency), how to determine service partition boundaries, and ten tips to dowse you towards success. I also discuss the role of polyglot development, enterprise governance, how data and databases fit into this new world, and tooling to help ensure consistency between core services like logging and monitoring. This session provides a thorough overview of the pros and cons for microservice architectures, when it is applicable, and some nascent best practices.

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.