Why Software Architects Fail

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Why Architects Fail 10 Health Problems You Should Know About Stefan Tilkov, innoQ @stilkov JUG HH, 7 April 2016

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DüsseldorfɾBerlinɾFrankfurtɾMünchenɾZürich www.innoq.com

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n. A pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identiﬁable group of signs or symptoms. n. A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful. n. Obsolete Lack of ease; trouble. dis ease (dĭ-zēzˈ) ·

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1. Over-Generalization Drive

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Symptom: Seeing commonalities in everything and turning them into generic solutions

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Phases in a Developer’s Life

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Phase 1. The Enthusiastic Developer “This stuff is cool - let’s build programs! For real people!”

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Boring, boring, boring. Create Customer Find Customer List Customers Edit Customer Delete Customer Create Order Find Order List Orders Edit Order Delete Order Create Product Find Product List Products Edit Product Delete Product

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Phase 2. The Disillusioned Developer “Oh. Real people have boring problems.”

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Create Customer Find Customer List Customers Edit Customer Delete Customer Create Order Find Order List Orders Edit Order Delete Order Create Product Find Product List Products Edit Product Delete Product

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Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing

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Phase 3. The Enthusiastic Architect “Generic solutions! Cool!” Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing

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‘ ‘Some architects, when faced with a problem, think “Hey, I’ll use a generic solution.” Now they have problem and a GenericProblemFactoryFacade. (with apologies to jwz)

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Phase 4. The Disillusioned Architect KISS YAGNI Lean Minimal viable product Story focus

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Phase 5. The “Wise” Architect Answer: It depends. Question: *

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‘ ‘ When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. Joel Spolsky “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare you”, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

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2. Domain Allergy

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Symptom: Treating the domain as a negligible nuisance

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Application (100%) Conﬁguration 10% The   Generic  Thing  Machine 90%

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80% 20% Functionality: 320% 80% Time/Effort:

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Configuration The   Generic  Thing  Machine Customer Developer

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The benefits of choices already made Microsoft .NET + Visual Studio SAP et. al. Ruby on Rails

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3. Obsessive Specialization Disorder

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Symptom: Believing every problem to be unique, even if it’s been solved 1,000 times

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Task: Read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.

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Donald Knuth Doug McIlroy Dr. Drang, http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ 10-page literal Pascal program, including innovative new data structure tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q

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Symptom: Believing everything needs to be a perfect match to your environment to be usable.

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4. Unhealthy Complexity Attraction

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Symptom: Being so smart you can’t be bothered by simple approaches.

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Benefits of Complexity > Challenging work > New and interesting experience > Self-esteem > Community > Barrier to entry > Job security

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5. Analysis Paralysis

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Symptom: Taking longer to evaluate than to actually do it

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Vendor Selection Collect and agree on requirements Week 0 Conduct market research Week 8 Send out RFP to selected vendors Week 10 Evaluate responses, create shortlist, start PoC  Week 14 Evaluate PoC results, recommend vendor X Week 20 Accept your CEO picked vendor Y Week 26

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6. Innovation Addiction

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(a.k.a. Phase 0 Fixation)

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Symptom: Things become progressively less fun the closer you get to production.

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‘ ‘Mindful choice of technology gives engineering minds real freedom: the freedom to contemplate bigger questions. Technology for its own sake is snake oil. Dan McKinley  http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

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Image Credit: Dan Dickinson, https://flic.kr/p/9mUs73

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7. Severe Tunneling Fixation

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Symptom: Enforcing an architectural approach that clashes with the framework, libraries or tools you use.

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‘ ‘I know what I like And I like what I know … Genesis

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8. Compulsive Spending Syndrome

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Symptom: Mistaking a high price tag for quality.

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Symptom: Early success brings in early money brings in illusions of grandeur.

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(a.k.a. TooMuchMoneyException)

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9. Conservatitis

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Symptom: Sticking with horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE tools because they’re there

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Symptom: Confusing “easy” with simple, creating accidental complexity

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simple complex easy hard Rich Hickey, “Simple Made Easy”, http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

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Symptom: Using fashionable technology because it’s popular (a.k.a. fallacy of argument by authority)

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10. Impact Dissonance

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Symptom: Becoming too detached from the actual system that is being delivered

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Related: Governance Megalomania

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Symptom: Believing everything has to be approved by you to ensure it meets architecture standards

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What architects want do Shape strategy 30 % Make important decisions 30 % Mentor developers 20 % Explore technologies 20 %

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What others think architects do Slow down development 20 % Pick the wrong tools 20 % Refuse to learn from devs 20 % Define annoying rules 40 %

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‘ ‘“Architect” is Latin for “Can’t code anymore.” Ted Neward

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What architects actually do Do technical stuff 5 % Act as salespeople 30 % Try to be involved 35 % Defend architecture 30 %

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Image Credit: Sean Michael Ragan, http://flic.kr/p/8XEm6L

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I don’t have an answer …

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… so here’s one, anyway

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Balance

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An Architect’s Success Formula Dogma and rules 10 % Experience 20 % Pragmatism 20 % Flexibility 10 % Minimalism 10 % Trends and future needs 10 % Experiments & PoCs 10 % Hands-on participation 10 % Vendor advice 0 %

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Stefan Tilkov  stefan.tilkov@innoq.com  Phone: +49 170 471 2625 innoQ Deutschland GmbH Krischerstr. 100 40789 Monheim am Rhein Germany Phone: +49 2173 3366-0 innoQ Schweiz GmbH Gewerbestr. 11 CH-6330 Cham Switzerland Phone: +41 41 743 0116 www.innoq.com Ohlauer Straße 43 10999 Berlin Germany Phone: +49 2173 3366-0 Ludwigstr. 180E 63067 Offenbach Germany Phone: +49 2173 3366-0 Kreuzstraße 16  80331 München Germany Phone: +49 2173 3366-0 Thank you – that’s all I have. @stilkov