Over the past two decades, Agile and the have strongly and deeply influenced the software development process at almost all levels and organizations. Many groups have shown huge gains and happy customers from Agile approaches; we’re not here to denigrate that. And no one in their right mind today would promote the BDUF (big design up front) model as the be-all and end-all of creating a modern, high-performance, highly available and fault tolerant system. There are just too many unknowns at the beginning. It’s why Agile works so well!

Without a documented architecture though, you can lie victim to the bus factor. In other words, it creates problems of unshared knowledge and unknown points of failure. If someone critical were to leave the project or the company, how could you maintain continuity without their knowledge? Moreover, you also want to make sure the system you are going to build is fit for purpose—that it meets the primary goals of what you are setting out to achieve by building it in the first place. Even if the first delivery of code or first few deliveries of code don’t satisfy all requirements—and they most certainly won’t—you want to track toward a design that does.

Join me in my discussion as we talk about "Why Architecture Matters"