Neal Ford

Building Evolutionary Architectures Workshop

9:00 AM MDT

This workshop highlights the ideas from the forthcoming Building Evolutionary Architectures, showing how to build architectures that evolve gracefully over time.

An evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change across multiple dimensions.

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later”. But then microservices showed that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. This workshop, based on my upcoming book, investigates the family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, along with how to build evolvable systems. Understanding how to evolve architecture requires understanding how different parts of architecture interact; I describe how to achieve appropriate coupling between components and services. Incremental change is critical for the mechanics of evolution; I cover how to build engineering and DevOps practices to support continuous change. Uncontrolled evolution leads to undesirable side effects; I cover how fitness functions build protective, testable scaffolding around critical parts to guide the architecture as it evolves.

The software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium, where any new tool, framework, or technique leads to disruption and the establishment of a new equilibrium. Predictability is impossible when the foundation architects plan against changes constantly in unexpected ways. Instead, prefer evolvability over predictability. This hands-on workshop provides a high-level overview of a different way to think about software architecture.

Outline:

• Architecture Dimensions
• Engineering Incremental change
• Architectural Characteristics
• Exercise: determine appropriate characteristics
• Identifying Architectural Patterns
• Exercise: components and patterns
• Identifying Fitness Functions
• Exercise: determining fitness functions
• Retrofitting Existing Architectures
• Building Evolvable Architectures

Stories Every Developer Should Know

4:30 PM MDT

Stories and lessons from architecture, design, process, and other sources, each illustrating important principles and pitfalls for modern architects.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  –George Santayana

The past is never dead. It's not even past. –William Faulkner

Most developers pursue the Latest and Greatest with intense fervor, yet the history of engineering, including software projects, contains rich lessons that we risk repeating ad nauseam. This session recounts a variety of stories of projects that failed architecturally…and why. Ranging from the Vasa in 1628 to Knight Capital in 2012, each story tells of a mistaken interpretation of some architectural fundamental principle and the consequences–some good, some less so. I I also look at the common threads for these stories, which resonates with problems many companies have but don't realize.

• Pets. Com
• San Francisco project
• The Vasa
• F16
• Sagrada Familia
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge
• null
• Ada
• Serialization
• Knight Capital
• Ariane 5
• Webvan
• Chandler project

Where Do Ideas Come From? Creating, Cultivating, and Communicating IP

8:30 PM MDT

How do you create creativity? This talk offers techniques and perspectives to discover, grow, and project your ideas.

Where do ideas for new talks, books, videos, software…ultimately, everything…come from? A common question at conference panels to the speakers is “Where do you get your ideas for talks?” This session answers that question, along with how some of us cultivate new ideas. This talk investigates three aspects of ideation:

— How do new ideas arise?<br>
I cover various ways of synthesizing new ideas: switching axiom(s), mutation, oblique strategies, and a host of other techniques to generate a germ of a new idea

— How do ideas grow into intellectual property?<br>
I cover techniques for iterating on ideas to discover deeper meanings and connections. I also cover how techniques to evolve and grow ideas.

— How do you communicate new IP?<br>
I cover various ways to convey IP: presentations, articles, books, videos, and a host of other media. I talk about how writing and presenting techniques to amplify your new idea and get it out into the world.

One key to building new IP is separating ideation, organization, and realization, which often become jumbled. By separating them, we can build practices to allow each to flourish. This talk provide concrete advice in each area to help realize new ideas.

Creativity is the reason we have all the Cool Stuff we have. This session investigates how to fan the spark of an idea into a roaring flame of intellectual erudition.

Building Evolutionary Architectures

9:00 AM MDT

An evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change along multiple dimensions.

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later”. But then microservices showed that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. This talk, based on my upcoming book, investigates the family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, along with how to build evolvable systems. Understanding how to evolve architecture requires understanding how architectural dimensions interact; I describe how to achieve appropriate coupling between components and services. Incremental change is critical for the mechanics of evolution; I cover how to build engineering and DevOps practices to support continuous change. Uncontrolled evolution leads to undesirable side effects; I cover how fitness functions build protective, testable scaffolding around critical parts to guide the architecture as it evolves.

The software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium, where any new tool, framework, or technique leads to disruption and the establishment of a new equilibrium. Predictability is impossible when the foundation architects plan against changes constantly in unexpected ways. Instead, prefer evolvability over predictability. This keynote illustrates how to achieve evolutionary architectures and how to retrofit existing systems to support better evolution.

Building Evolutionary Architectures: Architectural Fitness Function Katas

11:00 AM MDT

Building Evolutionary Architectures requires identifying and creating architectural fitness functions. This hands-on workshop defines fitness functions and provides group exercises to help identify and discover them.

According to the Building Evolutionary Architectures book, an architectural fitness function provides an objective integrity assessment of some architectural characteristic(s). This hands-on workshop provides examples of fitness functions and group exercises to identify, define, and implement a variety of fitness functions: atomic, holistic, continuous, triggered, temporal, and others.

Documenting and Presenting Software Architectures

1:30 PM MDT

This session covers two critical soft skills for architects:

• creating clear, concise documentation of software architecture, both structure and decisions
• presenting architectural ideas as clearly as possible

New architects find soft skills like creating lucid documentation and building compelling presentations challenging. This presentation covers a variety of ways to document ideas in software architecture, ranging from diagramming techniques (that aren't UML) to Architecture Decisions Records and ultimately to presentations. The second part of the talk leverages patterns and anti-patterns from the Presentation Patterns book to help architects build clear and concise representations of their ideas.

Hypothesis/Data Driven Development using Feature Toggles

3:15 PM MDT

Hypothesis and data driven development ties together current thinking about requirements, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, modern architecture, and engineering techniques to help rethink building software.

Agile development claims to abhor “Big Design Up Front”…yet what is that giant backlog building session but BDUF in other clothing? Back in the olden days of software development, we were forced to speculate on what users want, then build it. We were basically running a buffet. But what if we could switch to à la carte? With modern engineering practices like Continuous Delivery, we can shift our perspective and start building by hypothesis rather than speculation. This talk shows the full spectrum of software development, from ideation through execution and deployment, through the lens of modern software engineering practices. I discuss building a platform using feature toggles, canary releases, A/B testing, and other modern DevOps tools to allow you to run experiments to see what your users really want. By building a platform for experimentation, product development shifts from up-front guessing to market driven. This talk unifies the practices of modern architecture, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery to provide a new approach to feature development. This talk also demonstrates how to undertake major architectural restructuring with zero regression failures by relying on data and the scientific method.

Build Your Own Technology Radar Workshop for Architects

5:00 PM MDT

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company. This talk discusses using the radar for personal breadth development, architectural guidance, and governance.

ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board creates a “technology radar” twice a year, a working document that helps the company make decisions about interesting technologies and where we spend our time. ThoughtWorks then started conducting radar-building exercises for our clients, which provides a great medium for technologists company-wide to express their opinions about the technologies they use every day. For companies, creating a radar helps you document your technology decisions in a standard format, evaluate technology decisions in an actionable way, and create cross-silo discussions about suitable technology choices. This session describes the radar visualization and how to conduct a radar building session for yourself. After a brief introduction, the bulk of the workshop consists of attendees building a radar for the group, following the same procedure you'll use when you do this exercise at your company. At the end, we'll have created a unique Radar for this event and practiced doing it for yourself.