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Fundamentals of Software Architecture

19. Architecture Decisions​

An anti-pattern:

  • Andrew Koenig defines it as something that seems like a good idea when you begin, but leads you into trouble.
  • a repeatable process that produces negative results

Covering Your Assets anti-pattern​

It occurs when an architect avoids or defers making an architecture decision out of fear of making the wrong choice.

How to overcome Covering Your Assets?​

  • Wait until the last responsible moment to make decision, waiting until you have enough information to justify and validate your decision, avoid fall into the Analysis Paralysis anti-pattern.
  • continually collaborate with development teams to ensure decisions are feasible for implementation.

Groundhog Day anti-pattern​

It occurs when people don’t know why a decision was made, so it keeps getting discussed over and over and over.

How to overcome Groundhog Day?​

Important to provide both technical and business justifications for the decisions.

Business justifications​

  • cost
  • time to market
  • user satisfaction
  • strategic positioning

Email-Driven Architecture anti-pattern​

It occurs where people lose, forget, or don’t even know an architecture decision has been made and therefore cannot possibly implement that architecture decision.

How to overcome Email-Driven Architecture?​

  • To provide a link to the single system of record.
  • Only notify those people caring about the decision

Architecturally Significant​

Michael Nygard mentioned architecturally significant decisions affect the structure, nonfunctional characteristics, dependencies, interfaces or construction techniques.

  • Structure: impacting the patterns or styles of architecture being used
  • nonfunctional characterics: important for the application or system being developed or maintained.
  • dependencies: coupling points between components and/or services within the system, impact overal scalability, modularity, agility, testability, reliability, etc.
  • Interfaces refer to how services and components are accessed and orchestrated, usually through a gateway, integration hub, service bus, or API proxy.
  • construction techniques refer to decisions about platforms, frameworks, tools, and even processes that, although technical in nature, might impact some aspect of the architecture.

References​

Fundamentals of Software Architecture (Ford & Richards, O'Reilly 2020).