Reading Notes presented by BookClub.dev

This week we look at the penultimate chapter of Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change, chapter 7, Evolutionary Architecture Pitfalls and Antipatterns.

This chapter looks at 5 antipatterns and 5 pitfalls spread across three categories:

• Technical Architectures
• Incremental Change
• Business Concerns

Technical Architecture

The antipatterns for this category are:

• Vendor King
• Last 10% Trap
• Code Reuse Abuse

The pitfalls are:

• Leaky Abstractions
• Resume-Driven Development

Incremental Change

The antipattern for this category is:

• Inappropriate Governance

The pitfall is:

• Lack of Speed to Release

Business Concerns

The antipattern for this category is:

• Reporting

The pitfalls are:

• Product Customization
• Planning Horizons

This week we continue our look at Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change and we discuss chapter 6, Building Evolvable Architectures.

In this chapter, the authors lay out the basic mechanics and some guidelines for building evolvable architectures.

The basic mechanics of building an evolutionary architecture are:

1. Identify dimensions affected by evolution
2. Define fitness functions for each dimension
3. Use deployment pipelines to automate fitness functions

The guidelines for building an evolutionary architecture are:

• Remove Needless Complexity
• Make Decisions Reversible
• Prefer Evolvable over Predictable
• Build Anticorruption Layers
• Use Service Templates
• Build Sacrificial Architecture
• Mitigate External Change
• Updating Libraries versus Frameworks
• Prefer Continuous Delivery to Snapshots
• Version Services Internally

Join our Thursday night discussions to continue the conversation about this chapter. You can sign up at bookclub.dev. The discussion starts at 7 pm eastern and will go for about an hour.

Happy reading

This week we look at chapter 5 Evolutionary Data in Building Evolutionary Architectures.

This chapter has a guest contributor Pramod Sadalage, one of the coauthors of Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design (Amazon). This is a great reference book and goes a lot deeper into the ideas of this chapter.

Often our databases don't keep pace with our code. There is a cost to this, and here we look at ways to work faster and safer in the database.

Join the free weekly discussion for this chapter by signing up at bookclub.dev. The conversation starts at 7 pm eastern.

Happy reading

This week we are reading chapter 4, Architectural Coupling in Building Evolutionary Architecture: Support Constant Change.

This chapter introduces the concept of Architectural Quanta which the authors define as, "an independently deployable component with high functional cohesion, which includes all the structural elements required for the system to function properly."

This chapter also digs into several architecture patterns and evaluates how well they support the three primary aspects of evolutionary architecture fitness functions, incremental change, and appropriate coupling.

If you'd like to continue discussing these ideas join the free Thursday night discussion at 7 pm eastern by signing up at bookclub.dev

This week we look at chapter 3 of Building Evolutionary Architectures, Engineering Incremental Change.

Resources

• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation (Amazon)
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Amazon)
• Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Amazon)
• The Netflix Simian Army (blog post) (repo)
• GitHub Scientist (blog post) (repo)
• Fitness Function Katas

Keep the conversation going by joining our free Thursday night discussions at 7 pm Eastern. Sign up by going to bookclub.dev.

This week we look at chapter 2 Fitness Functions in Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change (Amazon)

We look at the various aspects of fitness functions including

• atomic vs. holistic
• triggered vs. continual
• static vs. dynamic
• automated vs. manual
• intentional vs. emergent
• temporal
• domain-specific

This Thursday the conversation will continue at 7 pm eastern. You can sign up to join for free by going to bookclub.dev.

Also this week we'll be working on some fitness function katas.

This week we look at chapter 1 Software Architecture of Building Evolutionary Architecture.

Who needs an architect?

How Do Committees Invent? (Original paper on Conway's Law)

Building Evolutionary Architecture (Amazon)

Join the free Thursday night discussion of this chapter by signing up at bookclub.dev. The discussion will start at 7 pm eastern.

Join an exciting 9 week series of discussions about Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change (Amazon).

Each week we'll discuss a chapter from the book and how we can apply it to our daily work.

You can sign up for the discussions at bookclub.dev.

I hope to see you there!

All good things must come to an end, and this is our final discussion of Extreme Programming Explained 2nd edition by Kent Beck.

What will you do differently after reading this book?

I hope you'll join our discussion this Thursday at 7 pm eastern as we discuss this. You can join by going to bookclub.dev/live

This is our final week reading from Extreme Programming Explained 2nd edition by Kent Beck.

We look at taking action to live by our values as well as the need to find balance.

Resources

• A Pattern Language (amazon)
• Design Patterns (amazon)
• How Buildings Learn (amazon)
• Office Space (amazon)
• Building Evolutionary Architecture (amazon)
• XP Yahoo Group

Join the discussion live at 7 pm eastern this Thursday bookclub.dev/live