Agile Software Architecture (with George Fairbanks)

-
George Fairbanks and I chatted via Google+ Hangout in February 2014 about agile software architecture. I think we found a groove pretty quickly and the conversation overall went great. I've created bookmarks of some of the main topic areas that we covered to make it easier to jump to bits of the discussion you might find more interesting.




During this Hangout we meandered through several topics starting with walking skeletons and leading to...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dealing with Constraints in Software Architecture Design

-
Image
Definition  of  constraint  (n) Bing Dictionary con·straint     [ kən stráynt ]     limiting factor: something that limits freedom of action state of restriction: a state in which freedom of action is severely restricted lack of spontaneity: a lack of warmth and spontaneity in somebody's manner or in the atmosphere on a particular occasion In software architecture design, constraints come in two basic flavors - technical and business.  On most projects there are only a handful of constraints, but these constraints are a highly influential architectural driver .  Constraints, as the dictionary definition above indicates, are a limiting factor and severely restrict options for making design decisions.  They are also fixed design decisions that cannot be changed and must be satisfied.  You could think of constraints as the ultimate non-negotiable, "must have" requirement.  It is for this reason that architecture design constraints must be created and acc
Read more

Architecture Haiku

-
Image
The most effective way to transfer complex, abstract ideas from one person’s brain to another person’s brain is by writing the ideas down. This premise permeates our whole approach to software design.  Entire books are dedicated to creating better documentation!  Following traditional documentation advice inevitably leads to comprehensive, albeit verbose, documents filled with important details that, sadly, too few stakeholders read.  There must be a better way. Introducing the Architecture Haiku George Fairbanks  originally came up with the idea of the Architecture Haiku as "a one-page, quick-to-build, uber-terse design description."  With only one page of paper (assumed standard, A4) to work with there is no space to be indecisive or indirect.  There might not even be room for diagrams - which at first sounds crazy, but perhaps is crazy brilliant!  We tried this idea on my team and it turned out to be a great, lightweight method for writing down and sharing architectur
Read more

Managing Multiple Ruby Versions with uru on Windows

-
My undergraduate software engineering professor was awesome . Here's one bit of advice he shared during his course that really stuck with me over the years. Pick a scripting language.  Any Scripting Language.  Learn to use it really, really well. Compiled programming languages obviously have a purpose, but lightweight, interpreted scripting languages are an important tool as well. An interpreted scripting language is the perfect choice for one off tests, tedious text manipulation, automated tasks, and simple tools. Scripts are easy to write, easy to share, and good enough to get the job done. My prof used Perl and was a whiz at it. I eventually settled on Ruby as my scripting language of choice. While the core language works really well across different platforms, as a predominantly Windows user,  I find that Ruby sometimes runs into problems in odd situations. One thing that is particularly annoying is the lack of a Ruby version manager. Version managers are a great idea
Read more