Things are going to be interesting over the next couple of months. I guess that my new role is part of the architecture team. I’ve already had quite a rude awakening of how the industry has bastardized XP and Scrum (after somehow being sheltered by working in a great XP company, and then being onsite as an expert), and traditional software architecture is one of those things that I’ve never been fond of. Note that I don’t mean architecture isn’t important, or that teams shouldn’t think about it. More that architecture models should be developed from actual requirements, and should be publically displayed to the other teams, and developed in a collaborative manner.
I’ve been re-reading a lot of stuff from Scott Ambler’s sites, and I found an essay he did on Agile Architecture which sums up how I’m feeling right now:
- Your architecture must be based on requirements otherwise you are hacking, it’s as simple as that.
- To promote communication within your development team I am a firm believer that you should follow the practice Display Models Publicly for all of your architectural diagrams because an architecture that is a closely guarded secret isn’t an architecture, it’s merely an egotistical exercise in futility.
Part of me feels like this is going to be an interesting exercise of the work I’ve done over the past several years. Here’s hoping we end up on the other side an agile project.
Good luck on the step into architecture land. I was in that world for about 5 months and the lack of a reasonable feedback cycle was disconcerting.