Architecture as a business asset

Architecture is as important as functionality, at least in the long run. As functionality is recognized as a business asset, it follows that architecture is a business asset, too. In this talk we show how we can approach architecture as an investment rather than a cost, and detail the practical implications both on the technical and on the business level.

Often systems that have great current value are expensive to evolve. In other words, the future value of the system is highly influenced by its structure. Indeed, when I talk with technical people, they broadly agree with the idea that architecture is as important as functionality, at least in the long run.

If we truly believe this, we should act accordingly. If two things are equally important, we should treat them with the same way. Given that functionality of a system is considered a business asset, it follows that the architecture is a business asset as well. That means that we should stop perceiving the effort around architecture as a cost, and start seeing it as an investment.

Functionality receives significant testing investments through direct development effort, dedicated tools and even education. In a way, testing is like an insurance, but unlike other insurances, this one is essentially guaranteed to pay off later on. Now, do you check the architecture with the same rigor? Do you have automatic architectural checks that prevent you from deploying when they fail? Not doing so means that half of the business assets remain uninsured. Half.

How can you test architecture automatically? You need to first see the code as data. The same applies for configurations, logs and everything else around a software system. It’s all data, and data is best dealt with through dedicated tools and skills.

About Tudor Gîrba

Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).

He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.

These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.

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