Agile approaches to development and online product delivery are almost de-facto these days. Every private and public sector organisation wants to be transformed, nimble, lean and able to deploy digital services quicker and quicker to their ever-demanding customers. And it is not just in the IT coding department that there’s been a change in vocabulary. An agile approach can even be adopted by a company’s commercial team, marketing department and even some of their operational functions (plus don’t even get me started on how much senior managers, procurement and HR have to change too – but that’s something for another post).
But I’m going to stick my next out (once again) on a subject I’m passionate about… Technical Architecture and how it clashes with agile delivery.
Or more succinctly put: Agile Architecture Doesn’t Work
There, I’ve said it now and I’ve been wanting to say it for a while. It has been on my mind as I’ve heard the opposite mentioned in podcasts, or read about it in blogs and books.
I guess I was trying to get this off my chest when I wrote my recent blog post “Digital Transformations starts and ends with Digital Architecture”. As in my mind, the science (or is it art?) of crafting a robust yet flexible technical architecture that supports digital business aims is the one thing you can’t build as you go.
Creating the technical architecture for your new venture takes planning. You also really only need one Technical Architect, the person who owns the architecture and has the responsibility for its solution design and ensures re-use of common components. Not a bunch of developers who all want to create a part of the architecture they are responsible for.
It’s like wandering around on a gap year between school and university (or school and work, or university and work). You may be able to make up your journey as you go, with just you or a travelling companion making the decisions… but the roads and the map are pretty much fixed.
So... although some agile practitioners talk about how agile approaches can help architecture deliver quicker or better. I firmly believe that it is architecture that facilitates faster and more robust agile delivery.
But I’m going to stick my next out (once again) on a subject I’m passionate about… Technical Architecture and how it clashes with agile delivery.
Or more succinctly put: Agile Architecture Doesn’t Work
There, I’ve said it now and I’ve been wanting to say it for a while. It has been on my mind as I’ve heard the opposite mentioned in podcasts, or read about it in blogs and books.
I guess I was trying to get this off my chest when I wrote my recent blog post “Digital Transformations starts and ends with Digital Architecture”. As in my mind, the science (or is it art?) of crafting a robust yet flexible technical architecture that supports digital business aims is the one thing you can’t build as you go.
Creating the technical architecture for your new venture takes planning. You also really only need one Technical Architect, the person who owns the architecture and has the responsibility for its solution design and ensures re-use of common components. Not a bunch of developers who all want to create a part of the architecture they are responsible for.
It’s like wandering around on a gap year between school and university (or school and work, or university and work). You may be able to make up your journey as you go, with just you or a travelling companion making the decisions… but the roads and the map are pretty much fixed.
So... although some agile practitioners talk about how agile approaches can help architecture deliver quicker or better. I firmly believe that it is architecture that facilitates faster and more robust agile delivery.
No comments:
Post a Comment