Category Archives: Agile & Architecture
I’ve just spent three enjoyable days at the 2006 Enterprise Architecture Conference in London. IRM did their usual excellent job of making it run like clockwork, and my good friend Sally Bean helped them develop an interesting and varied programme. To my mind the best speakers were Jeff Scott, and Chris Wilson of BP. Another encouraging sign was the presence of a great many International delegates.
I presented a paper on Agile Architecture. If you regularly read my work you’ll recognise many of the ideas, but I’ve managed to bring them all together for the first time. You can download my slides and script here.
What was very interesting was how the thrust of the material has changed from a few years ago. No-one was claiming that a given framework, process or toolset can solve EA problems. At the risk of being uncharitable I thought John Zachman’s ideas sounded very tired, and there was almost no mention of alternative frameworks such as TOGAF. I may have self-selected by not attending any vendor sessions, but there was also no promotion of tools or technology. A common view was that EA, SOA and many supporting concepts are currently entering the trough of the hype cycle.
Instead the focus was largely on people-related problems and approaches. The labels varied, but several speakers introduced ideas familiar to agile architects. Maybe we’re doing something right after all.
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Just in case you haven’t already seen it…. Why you need architects, in song and dance. Enjoy! Continue reading →
I am looking for one of my clients into how costs can be reduced, or quality increased, by increasing the extent to which testing is automated. As a first step, I am trying to develop a comprehensive list of test Continue reading →
If anyone is interested in hearing more about my views on architecture, and how agile methods apply to the work of the architect, please sign up for the 2006 Enterprise Architecture Conference in London in June. I’m presenting a paper Continue reading →
I don’t really believe in a common architectural process. As the author of a successful project management book, and recent articles on data architecture methods, I probably shouldn’t say this, but to paraphrase a famous quote, “When I hear ‘process’, Continue reading →
Almost all integration projects contain one or more transformations (sometimes called “mappings”) between two different structures holding equivalent data (for example the order tables in the database, and the order XML message). We know how to model the individual static Continue reading →
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about a “city planning” metaphor for Enterprise Architecture development. Pat Helland’s article “Metropolis” in the Microsoft Architecture Journal is a very good example (see my post on this for some key Continue reading →
I’ve just posted my review of Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolfe’s excellent book on Enterprise Integration using messaging, “Enterprise Integration Patterns”. Overall it’s an excellent book, and wiil probably become a “bible” for those involved in the high-level design of Continue reading →
I’ve just read an excellent paper by Pat Helland of Microsoft, in which he likens the development of cities and manufacturing in the 19th century to the development of systems and business models now. His conclusion – IT at the Continue reading →
Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz has set up an interesting new site / blog dedicated to software architecture. Of particular note, he’s trying to put some detail on the architecture “process” which is often negelcted as a single box on the development process Continue reading →
There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the “Domain Specific Language” front at the moment. Martin Fowler published “Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?”, in which he concludes that the common programming pattern of setting Continue reading →