The Paradox of Agile Architecture Quality: Designing for Failure

Copyright © 2014, Intellyx, LLC

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The Paradox of Agile Architecture Quality:

Designing for Failure

Jason Bloomberg

President

[email protected]

@theebizwizard

About Jason Bloomberg

• President of Intellyx

• Advise companies on their digital transformation initiatives & help vendors communicate their agility stories

• Write for Forbes, Wired, & DevX on Digital Transformation

• Buy my latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution

Copyright © 2014, Intellyx, LLC2

The Iron Triangle


Quality: The Fourth Corner


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What about Agility?

• Business agility is a metarequirement

• Requirement that requirement change must be supported

• Balance quality and agility


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Requirement: Make the Organization More Agile

Agile Architecture Quality Star


Best-Effort Quality

• Quality takes time, limiting agility

• Insufficient agility lowers quality

• Need to rethink approach to quality

• Preventing adverse behavior less important than automatic recovery from such behavior

– Core Cloud architecture principle


Resilience More Important than Being Defect-Free P

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Different Meanings of “Agile”

• “Agile-with-a-capital-A”

– Software development that follows the Agile Manifesto

• General meaning of “agile”

• Business agility as property of an organization


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The Agile Manifesto

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developingsoftware by doing it and helping others do it.Through this work we have come to value:

– Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

– Working software over comprehensive documentation

– Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

– Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items onthe right, we value the items on the left more.


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Context: Software Development

• Focus on small teams that crank out code

• Iterative, self-organizing, collaborative

• Focus on creating working software


Well-run Agile development means producing a lot of good software

quickly

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What about Architecture on Agile Projects?

• We don’t need no stinkin’ architecture!

• Architecture lumped in with documentation (less is more)

• Architects slow down developers

• Architects produce artifacts that aren’t Agile

– Lead to extra work


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Widespread belief that Agile and Architecture don’t mix

But we Do Need Architecture!

• Software architecture

– Appropriate modularization of code

– Selection of appropriate components & libraries

– Integration strategy

• Systems architecture

– Scalability of distributed application

– Cloud deployment issues

– Availability, caching, etc.


Create Minimum Viable Architecture

• All documentation, artifacts, diagrams, etc. are means to an end

• Don’t architect more than the stakeholders want

• Problems:

– Shortsighted

– Leads to legacy issues

– Limits agilityCopyright © 2014, Intellyx, LLC13 P

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Defer Commitment on Design Decisions

• Traditional architecture completed before development

• On Agile projects, tentative architecture good enough

• Commit to design decisions in appropriate iteration/sprint


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Why Agile Software Architecture isn’t Agile

• Agile movement focuses on working software

– Focus on getting the software to meet its requirements

– Get all roadblocks out of the way

• Agile-built software is coded to be fit for purpose


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Instant Legacy

• Difficult to upgrade

• Systems are inflexible

• Impossible to replace

• Difficult to customize

• Challenge to integrate

• Expensive over time


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The Overbuilding Paradox

• How do stakeholders know what flexibility they will require?

• How generalized should code be?

• When to build capabilitiesvs. when to build affordances?


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Capabilities vs. Affordances

• Capability

– Ability to perform or achieve certain outcomes through features or functions

– Apps have capabilities

• Affordance

– A property of an object which allows an individual to perform an action

– Tools have affordances

– Depends upon how user wants to use tool

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Scaling Agile for the Enterprise

• Enterprise Architecture context

– Organization, process, technology, and information

• Legacy context

– Existing applications, middleware, systems of record

• Business focused, iterative, get stuff to work, iconoclastic


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Business Agility

• Responsiveness

– Tactical value

• Resilience

– Risk mitigation

• Innovativeness

– Strategic value


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Ability to respond to change in the business environment and leverage change for competitive advantage

Responsiveness

• The ability to respond quickly and efficiently to (potentially) positive change in the business environment

– Changing customer demand

– Changing marketplace environment

– Changing supply chain factors

• Tactical driver


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Resilience

• The ability to respond quickly and efficiently to negative change in the business environment

– Managing risk

– Bouncing back from adverse events

– Disaster recovery

– Security breach response

– Regulatory change response

• Tactical driverCopyright © 2014, Intellyx, LLC22

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Innovativeness

• The ability to introduce change into the business environment in order to achieve a strategicadvantage

– New products or services

– Expand market share

– Enter new markets


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The Goal of Agile Software

• Requirement to build software that responds to changing requirements

• Inherent flexibility vs. rapid development & deployment


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Bloomberg Agile Architecture Layers of Abstraction


META Dealing with Change (metaprocesses, metapolicies, etc. )

DYNAMIC Abstract Models (dynamic schemas, dynamic APIs, etc.)

ABSTRACTED (LOGICAL)

Abstracted Technology (schemas, software interfaces, etc.)

PHYSICAL Technology (software, middleware, databases, etc.)

What are You Writing?

• Code?

– Least flexible, most susceptible to overbuilding, reuse always a challenge

• Metadata via declarative programming?

– Abstracts code, but leads to complexity shell game

• Abstract models?

– Essential for implementable Agile Architecture, but vendors largely fall short


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Applying Model-Driven Architecture

• Business model drives platform-independent model, platform-independent model drives platform-specific models

• For BAA, business model at meta level

– Represents business agility driver

• Abstract models resolve to logical models at run time


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The Agility Platform


Your Application

Your Application

Application-Building Tool

Your Application

Application-Building Tool

Tool-Building Platform

Maximize Affordances

Coding for a Declarative Model

• Avoid declarative shell game

– Pushing all the complexity to the configuration (declarative model)

• Configuration should be

– Standards-based

– Browser UI friendly

– Simple

– Consistent

• Code should focus on affordances


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Tool-Building Agility Platform: Maximum

Affordance

• Instead of software that can do things, want software that can enable users to do things

– Maximize affordances

– Software smart enough to afford any action

• Computers are examples of maximum affordance

• Build software with the same purpose


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Working with Abstract Models

• Abstracts choice of schema

• Abstracts choice of API contract

• Abstracts semantic context


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Resolve to logical models at run time

Supporting Abstract Models in Software

• Tool-building platform (business agility platform)

– All affordances, affords tool-building capabilities

• Application-building tool

– Affords application-building capabilities to non-developers

– Rich UI support

– Non-imperative logic

• Event-driven, process-centric, and/or rules-based, for example


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Where’s Our Business Agility?

• Organizations must be responsive, resilient, and innovative

• Business agility is a property of the enterprise

• People and technology can be flexible as well, but we must architect our organizations to be agile


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The Transformative Role of Automation

• Cloud automates operational environment

• DevOps as automation-driven organizational change


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DevOps as Model for Cross-Cutting Architecture

From DevOps to “BizOps”

• Before: dev chucking code to test, then over wall to ops

• Now: continuous test, continuous deployment

• In progress: responsiveness to continuous requirements change & variation


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DevOps & AA Quality Star


DevOps Drumbeat


Jason Bloomberg

President, Intellyx

[email protected]

@theebizwizard

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