Why Architecture Matters to Tech Leaders

Software architecture can be defined as the internal structure of a software system. As such it influences many critical aspects of software systems like maintainability, comprehensibility, changeability and security. One would think that given the importance of a good architecture most systems would be well structured and not suffer from large amounts of structural or architectural erosion. Just the opposite is true. Most non-trivial systems with more than 100,000 lines of code are in bad shape and require enormous efforts to keep them alive. Developers spend most of their time with figuring out complex interdependencies in the code base.

After analyzing the reasons why so many systems end up in bad shape we will focus on strategies to improve the situation.(Spoiler: Micro Services are usually NOT the solution for this problem)


About Alexander von Zitzewitz

Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.

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