Why Software Architects Fail

Slide 1

Slide 1 text

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

Slide 2

Slide 2 text

DüsseldorfɾBerlinɾFrankfurtɾMünchenɾZürich www.innoq.com

Slide 3

Slide 3 text

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) ·

Slide 4

Slide 4 text

1. Over-Generalization Drive

Slide 5

Slide 5 text

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

Slide 6

Slide 6 text

Phases in a Developer’s Life

Slide 7

Slide 7 text

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

Slide 8

Slide 8 text

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

Slide 9

Slide 9 text

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

Slide 10

Slide 10 text

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

Slide 11

Slide 11 text

Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing

Slide 12

Slide 12 text

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

Slide 13

Slide 13 text

‘ ‘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)

Slide 14

Slide 14 text

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

Slide 15

Slide 15 text

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

Slide 16

Slide 16 text

‘ ‘ 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

Slide 17

Slide 17 text

2. Domain Allergy

Slide 18

Slide 18 text

Symptom: Treating the domain as a negligible nuisance

Slide 19

Slide 19 text

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

Slide 20

Slide 20 text

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

Slide 21

Slide 21 text

Configuration The   Generic  Thing  Machine Customer Developer

Slide 22

Slide 22 text

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

Slide 23

Slide 23 text

3. Obsessive Specialization Disorder

Slide 24

Slide 24 text

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

Slide 25

Slide 25 text

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.

Slide 26

Slide 26 text

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

Slide 27

Slide 27 text

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

Slide 28

Slide 28 text

4. Unhealthy Complexity Attraction

Slide 29

Slide 29 text

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

Slide 30

Slide 30 text

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

Slide 31

Slide 31 text

5. Analysis Paralysis

Slide 32

Slide 32 text

Symptom: Taking longer to evaluate than to actually do it

Slide 33

Slide 33 text

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

Slide 34

Slide 34 text

6. Innovation Addiction

Slide 35

Slide 35 text

(a.k.a. Phase 0 Fixation)

Slide 36

Slide 36 text

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

Slide 37

Slide 37 text

‘ ‘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

Slide 38

Slide 38 text

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

Slide 39

Slide 39 text

7. Severe Tunneling Fixation

Slide 40

Slide 40 text

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

Slide 41

Slide 41 text

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

Slide 42

Slide 42 text

8. Compulsive Spending Syndrome

Slide 43

Slide 43 text

Symptom: Mistaking a high price tag for quality.

Slide 44

Slide 44 text

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

Slide 45

Slide 45 text

(a.k.a. TooMuchMoneyException)

Slide 46

Slide 46 text

9. Conservatitis

Slide 47

Slide 47 text

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

Slide 48

Slide 48 text

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

Slide 49

Slide 49 text

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

Slide 50

Slide 50 text

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

Slide 51

Slide 51 text

10. Impact Dissonance

Slide 52

Slide 52 text

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

Slide 53

Slide 53 text

Related: Governance Megalomania

Slide 54

Slide 54 text

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

Slide 55

Slide 55 text

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

Slide 56

Slide 56 text

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

Slide 57

Slide 57 text

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

Slide 58

Slide 58 text

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

Slide 59

Slide 59 text

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

Slide 60

Slide 60 text

I don’t have an answer …

Slide 61

Slide 61 text

… so here’s one, anyway

Slide 62

Slide 62 text

Balance

Slide 63

Slide 63 text

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 %

Slide 64

Slide 64 text

Stefan Tilkov  [email protected]  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