Ralph Johnson defined architecture as "the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other". Given our inability to tell the future how can we design effectively for it? Much project management thinking is based on the elimination of uncertainty, and advice on software architecture and guidance for future-proofing code often revolves around adding complexity to embrace uncertainty. In most cases, this is exactly the opposite path to the one that should be taken.

The talk looks at how uncertainty, lack of knowledge and options can be used to partition and structure the code in a system.