When I first started working as a developer, agile was a taboo-word, seen as a fad driven by developers. Scrum was, at least in Australia, unheard of and I luckily fell into a team experimenting with XP (Extreme Programming) combining CruiseControl with CVS and the first version of JUnit.

In those days, most projects ran using some sort of waterfall process with a lengthy requirements-gathering phase, a long architectural design phase followed by problematic development and often a stressful testing phase. You were lucky to get access to a new development because there were long delays in obtaining new infrastructure, waiting for some operations person to set up the machine, configure the services and grant you access.

Fast forward to today where we have a completely different world of technology. We have rich, open source libraries that give us fundamental building blocks to focus on solving our problems. We have powerful computers with vast disk space, processing capacity and memory that enable us to build complex features without waiting for a lengthy compile or build phase. We have access to cloud services that give us even more compute power, disk space and broadband that allow us to rapidly interact with remote services, almost as if they were on a local network.

Today’s world of building software looks very different from what it looked ten or fifteen years ago. The way that we need to design and architect our systems also needs to change. This is one of the reasons why my co-authors and I decided to write the book, “Building Evolutionary Architectures”

Long phases of designing an architecture will likely result in an architecture that will be cumbersome to build. Zero architectural design will fail to meet what we deem as a software’s “fitness function.” Instead, developers need to consider how their systems will adapt to change and we’ve looked at modern software development practices, methodologies and processes to understand what supports change and, more importantly, what typically hinders change.

If you’re interested more in this topic, then check out this page on how you can learn more about building evolutionary architectures.