Owning the Architecture

One of the main principles in Software architecture is the fact that there is always an architecture. That is, there is no system made without an architecture in place. Good or bad, the architecture is, conceptually, the system structure, the organization of components, their relations and the relations they have with the system’s outer world. So, you cannot have a system without it.

The problem, discussions and disagreements come when we address the architecture actual handling. There we may find the position of letting the architecture “emerge” from the code written. Architect’s are sometimes decidedly marked for extinction, since they are not needed for development, simply because they do not “code“ but perform a Big Design Up Front that is useless at the end of the day (that is what that position holds as true, I disagree of course). Other positions often refer to architects as facilitators for high level design and decision takers regarding global and important issues. Yet, to others, architects are just highly experienced developers that should be helping coding, another level just above the senior developer.

The position I now describe here is the one I heartily believe is the one all architects should adopt. (Just because it is the natural one for handling the architecture.)

First, let’s see what’s been done so far…

How do you deal with the system’s architecture?Well, you can:

1.  Develop, code and later on see what was created.
2.  Define it (design) and then try to create it by development.
3.  Forget about it. Focus on code.

As you can see, architecture will be always there, but it will grow wild in all three cases. Yes, case 2 also has problems since almost 100% of the time the resulting architecture is different (sometimes substantially different) than the one defined at the beginning. Common sense dictates that we should at least foresee the architecture from the beginning and start building it with code, keeping an eye on what that code is actually producing.

Now, no matter what you do, you end up defining an architecture. Either by planning, by designing, or by directly coding it. At the end, the architecture is defined by someone. The question is then who? (architects? Developers? The client?) And then How?  (coding? Designing? Deciding?). Common sense dictates again that all those roles are involved in the definition and creation. That means there should be a coordination, and a high end control of what is going on (not dictating, but controlling). That role is, of course, the one of the architect.

How does an architect control the architecture definition?Well, we have several stereotypes applied to architects, that we can recall:

1. The documenter. Architects are seen as document generators, that are happy writing designs and other documents nobody reads.
    
2. The technical Project Manager. Here the architect is the one managing the project at the technical levels. A technical lead. Sometimes a technical director. Some others a technical puppeteer that holds the developers strings.
    
3. The Ancient, Know-It-All. This seems to believe that years will create a good architect, with unsurpassed knowledge. Many time this architect is seen in a Ivory tower, and some others it just holds the answer to all questions.

None of the above stereotypes really deal with the architecture control. Documentation may be an important tool to keep updated information of what the architecture looks like in a precise moment in time. There should be enough coordination and direction capabilities in the architect to manage the building process. And of course, there should be enough experience to make the correct decisions, coach, mentor and provide advice to coders and designers. Still, documents are not the final goal, nor the architect dictates directly what is to be done, nor he knows all and should not be at all difficult to approach.

So, we can say the Architect Owns the architecture. Owning means basically being responsible of:

1. Knowing what the architecture is, looks like, in a moment in time.
    
2. Adjusting the principles, decisions and rationale based on the feedback got from the development process (this includes the information that actual coding returns, plus stakeholder feedback).
    
3. Rectifying actual coding and design if that breaks the rationale of the defined architecture.
    
4. Make everybody included in the development process (that also includes stakeholders), participating on the adjustments and the architecture visualization.

It is clear now that the architect’s role goes far beyond that just imagine a proposed architecture at the first phase of the development process. It is responsible for the real architecture, the one built, at each step of the cycle. For that he will need:

1. Visualization of the real architecture. It is out of the scope of this post to discuss how to do that, but one process I should mention is the “In Deep, Vertical Peer Review” that involves all three levels of review (strategy, tactical and operational) in all the phases, instead of just one review per phase.
    
2. Rationale and goal validation. This process is very important, where we can validate the goals are still being achieved even if there are changes in any of the levels. For that, rationale is extremely important.
    
3.  A trade-off process. Of course, it is impossible to always achieve everything. There should be a trade-off process that evaluates the options and resolves for the one that keeps the goals as unchanged as possible, and results in the least cost. This of course involves all stakeholders.
    
4.  A cross refactoring process/redesign. All adjustments will change things. Refactoring is a way to improve things without changing actual behavior. The redesign may change behavior. The idea of the process is to try keeping the changes at the lowest level. That is, try first to adjust only code, without changing design nor strategic/architectural decisions. Then go up. The strongest change will require the architecture redefinition, with possibly the highest cost.

All this applies to all phases, including the quality assuring, deployment and acceptance.
How to do all that in different contexts and projects require a whole book. So far let’s simply summarize that:

1. Architect deals with many tasks, including but not restricted to documenting, managing and deciding.
    
2. The architect’s responsibility is to get an architecture done (meaning, built) satisfying the stakeholders goals. This requires continuous verification of goal and business value achievement.
    
3. Performing all that goes far beyond just coding.

Conclusion: Owning the architecture means being responsible of its construction, taking care of all the complex processing that development requires.

An Evolving Architecture?

Written by: William Martinez Pomares
Published on March 1st, 2009 @ 04:42:42 pm , using 619 words


Neal Ford from ThoughtWorks, recently wrote an article that is the first of a series related to architecturing and design called Evolutionary Architecture and Emergent Design. The first article is a revisit to the architecture and design concepts. In it, Neal describes the evolutionary architecture with these lines:

However, just because you can't allow architecture to emerge doesn't mean that it can't evolve. If you have created a flexible architecture and taken care not to create an irreversible decision, you can allow it to evolve over time as new concerns appear.

Now, I wrote a comment on TSS where I think the "Evolutionary" name may be applicable to the architecture concept I have:

In several discussions I had had, the idea of an architecture is repeatedly presented as a bunch of paper with fixed ideas that will not come true after all. I argue that should not be true.
Granted, a bunch of paper may define the "architecture to be", but the architecture is not ideas but the actual structure of working software at the end. So, Architects must define the final goal not as an stone written truth, but as an ideal outcome which will be supported by principles and guidelines to succeed. Those guidelines should show the path of adjustments to the ideas depending on the construction evolution. And all that is aimed to solve the stakeholders concerns.
In that line, and architecture is what you get at the end, and you set your goals and guides to drive the solution at the beginning, and make your decisions not as late as you could but as soon as they are in the best moment to be taken. (Yes, it is not the same). Under that idea, the architecture is something alive, that will change over time while it is being developed. It "evolves", and that is what I like about the article.

Still, something feels not quite right with this. And that is the idea of thinking we have an architecture from the beginning to evolve. Yes, what we have is a goal with a nice idea of what the architecture will be, but no real architecture (remember the real architecture is what you have once the project is done).

Now, let's clarify this further:

Evolution: the process of removing and adding features or improvements so the new product is better. The natural evolution may be by chance, but the induced evolution is pre-defined.

Evolution Rules:Evolution always follow a predefined set of rules. For architecture, these are the principles and guidelines defined at the beginning of the project.

Designed Architecture: The description of the Architecture-to-be that solves the stakeholder concerns.

Real Architecture: The one you have in every system, even if it is not documented. Of course, you need to finish the system first.

Using the above terms, you can have a set of concerns, the you design an architecture and a set of principles and guidelines to construct it. Those principles should allow for modifications based on a retrospective analysis of the results so far, at each step of construction. Once construction is over, you have the real architecture.

The thing that evolves, is the actual architecture design, the real architecture is emerging. Unless you construct whatever you think of first and then start changing all that is not working to improve. There you can have not one, but several architectures, one is the evolution result from the previous one.

Finally, you can have, as Neal mentions, an architecture designed to evolve (with flexibility included), which is different of what we are talking here. That would be an evolving system that has an architecture that allows it. Tricky!

REST and the Wagging The Dog Syndrome.

Written by: William Martinez Pomares
Published on April 9th, 2009 @ 11:06:45 pm , using 559 words

Commenting on Tim Bray’s blog post about the use of Post for REST, I came to a discussion about actually how much RESTFull is an API, and more specifically if it should be RESTFull at all.
You see, many people is trying to get their APIs into the REST world, and some people like Dilip Krishnan believe the reason is to gain "simplicity, discoverability and serendipitous reuse of the solution". Still, as I read through all the comments on how to "imagine" the app so it fits REST, I feel a greater sense of something not right about it.
When creating a solution, you may want to analyze first the functional requirements, and then the quality properties. The ones noted by Dilip are great, but I’m not sure all apps that hit the web every day need to accomplish them. Furthermore, REST is not the only way of getting those attributes! Let’s explain a little what this famous style is so you can understand what I’m saying.
The REpresentational State Transfer style was born as an architectural style to represent/improve the modern web implementation, as Roy Fielding explains in his dissertation. So, REST is an architectural style, and that means it has a set of constrains that the app needs to adopt to obtain the benefits. But that architectural style is not built from scratch. It is built by composing several other well known styles like Client-Cache-Stateless-Server, Layered-Client-Server or Code-On-Demand. Any of those can be used separately and all their pros and cons will be cast upon the solution.
Now, this is a special case where an implementation is taken as a base to develop an architectural style that improves it. Usually, you have a solution to build with a set of requirements, and you look for an style that better fit into the problem. But once you start changing the problem just to adjust to an architectural style, you are actually “Wagging the Dog” there. And it seems to be a contagious syndrome.
So, what does it need to have an APP to be worthy enough to use the style? Well, first

• - the semantics should be the ones of the style.
• - Next, the app should try to solve a similar issue the style is solving, and third,
• - the app’s quality attributes should be the ones the style is promoting.

If some of the three is not true for your app, and you still want to use the style, I may guess you are trying to get the buzzword title instead of the real benefits.
One little clarification at this point: The web is one implementation that follows the style, it is NOT REST itself. What do I mean by that? Creating an app that runs on the web doesn’t make it RESTFull. Using HTTP for your API won’t make it either (I wanted to clarify it since all comments are about HTTP and its semantics and it seems everybody confuses the implementation with the style). You need to read the dissertation to learn all the constrains, but even more important, to learn if the style is for you or not. You may learn HTTP is not a required protocol, but one constructed that meets the constrains. You can build your own! (and make it standard).
William Martinez.

Glossary

Written by: William Martinez
Published on April 26th, 2008 @ 06:31:45 pm , using 448 words at here

During all these discussions, in this blog and other forums, I have found some semantic dissonance. This means some people use the same word and even the same concept, but actually understand different things from it.
So, words like architecture and design mean paper to some and process to others; they may be normal, unnecessary or even offensive. This is a little post that tries do define some of the words I use, just to be sure anybody that reads me understands what my meaning is.

Design: As a verb, is the process of decision making towards the creation of a solution. As a noun, it is the one word name of Design Description.

Design Description: The description of the decisions taken toward a solution and their rationale. It can be a document, image or even multimedia.

Code: Sentences, written in a particular language, that describe the solution. It can be at any level, and may (or not) be executable.

Strategic Design: Design that focus on architecturally significant issues, whose majority are global decisions described in an intensional way.

Tactical Design: Design that focus on tactical issues, whose majority are local decisions described in an intensional way.

Micro Design: Design that focus on operational issues, whose majority are local decisions described in an extensional way.

Domain: Is the set of concepts and relations that define a reality. It is not a description, since those concepts may be infinite or unbounded.

Abstraction: Is the result of abstracting: process of elimination of detail without loosing the essence of the concept being abstracted.

Model: Abstraction of a reality from an specific domain.

Modeling: Process of describing a possible reality in an abstraction level.

Architecture: System Structures, the externally visible properties and the relations between them. NOT PAPER.

System: Independent structure of components interrelated.

Software Intensive Systems. Systems where the majority of the components are software based ones.

Solution: Part or whole of a system that solves a problem from a domain.

Meta something: Meta means beyond, above of, self-referring. Using those concepts of the suffix, we may say meta-modeling is modeling models. Meta-data is data about the data. Meta-language is a language that allows us to describe languages. Meta-comments are comments about the comment. And so on.

Now some notes: from the above, we can say interesting things. For instance, modeling is not a paper generation process, but a description process. Modeling can be use to describe a solution, thus it can also be interpreted as coding. And code, it is not just writing executable lines (in fact, they are not executable, they need more work).

When time and other discussions require it, I will be posting more glossary terms.