Why Software Architects Fail

We've all seen them: Ambitious projects, starting out with grand visions, ending up as costly lessons in what not to do, leaving behind the ruins of promising paradigms, technologies, tools, and careers. But why do architecture approaches sometimes hurt instead of providing value? Why has "architect" become a negative term for some people? And what can we do to improve our own work? In this keynote, we'll look at some of the most common pitfalls that ensure you'll come up with a disaster, and discuss how they can be avoided.

Transcript

1. Why Architects Fail 10 Health Problems You Should Know About Stefan Tilkov | @stilkov | innoQ
2. 1. Over-Generalization Drive
3. Phases in a Developer’s Life
4. 1. The Enthusiastic Developer “This stu is cool - let’s build programs! For real people!”
5. 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
6. 2. The Disillusioned Developer “Oh. Real people have boring problems.”
7. 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
8. Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing
9. 3. The Enthusiastic Architect “Generic solutions! Cool!” Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing
10. ‘ ‘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)
11. 4. The Disillusioned Architect KISS YAGNI Lean Minimable viable product Story focus
12. 5. The “Wise” Architect Answer: It depends. Question: *
13. Symptom: Seeing commonalities in everything and turning them into generic solutions
14. ‘ ‘ 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 ne, 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.joelonso ware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
15. 2. Domain Allergy
16. Symptom: Treating the domain as a negligible nuisance
17. Application (100%) Configuration 10% The Generic Thing Machine 90%
18. 80% 20% Functionality: 320% 80% Time/Effort:
19. Configuration The Generic Thing Machine Customer Developer
20. 3. Obsessive Specialization Disorder
21. Symptom: Believing every problem to be unique, even if it’s been solved 1,000 times
22. Task: Read a le of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.
23. 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
24. Symptom: Believing everything needs to be a perfect match to your environment to be usable.
25. 4. Unhealthy Complexity Attraction
26. Bene ts of Complexity Challenging work New and interesting experience Self-esteem Community Barrier to entry Job security
27. Symptom: Being so smart you can’t be bothered by simple approaches.
28. 5. Analysis Paralysis
29. 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
30. Symptom: Taking longer to evaluate than to actually do it
31. 6. Finalization De ciency
32. (a.k.a. Phase 0 Fixation)
33. ‘ ‘Bubbles don’t crash! Bertrand Meyer
34. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/catalog/12993-3.htm
35. Symptom: Things become progressively less fun the closer you get to production.
36. 7. Severe Tunneling Fixation
37. ‘ ‘I know what I like And I like what I know … Genesis
38. Symptom: Enforcing an architectural approach that clashes with the framework, libraries or tools you use.
39. 8. Compulsive Spending Syndrome
40. (a.k.a. TooMuchMoneyException)
41. Symptom: Mistaking a high price tag for quality.
42. Symptom: Early success brings in early money brings in illusions of grandeur.
43. 9. Exaggerated Risk Aversion/ Conservatitis
44. Name three projects where this technology has been applied in the same industry
45. Symptom: Sticking with horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE tools because they’re there
46. simple complex easy hard Rich Hickey, “Simple Made Easy”, http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
47. Symptom: Confusing “easy” with simple, creating accidental complexity
48. 10. Impact Dissonance
49. What architects want do Shape strategy 30% Make important decisions 30% Mentor developers 20% Explore technologies 20%
50. What others think architects do Slow down development 20% Pick the wrong tools 20% Refuse to learn from devs 20% Define annoying rules 40%
51. ‘ ‘“Architect” is Latin for “Can’t code anymore.” Ted Neward
52. What architects actually do Do technical stuff 5% Act as salespeople 30% Try to be involved 35% Defend architecture 30%
53. Symptom: Becoming too detached from the actual system that is being delivered
54. Related: Governance Megalomania
55. Symptom: Believing everything has to be approved by you to ensure it meets architecture standards
56. Image Credit: Sean Michael Ragan, http://flic.kr/p/8XEm6L The Cure?
57. I don’t have an answer …
58. … so here’s one, anyway
59. Balance
60. 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%
61. Questions? Comments? Stefan Tilkov, @stilkov stefan.tilkov@innoq.com http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/ Phone: +49 170 471 2625 innoQ Deutschland GmbH http://www.innoq.com Krischerstr. 100 40789 Monheim am Rhein Germany Phone: +49 2173 3366-0 innoQ Schweiz GmbH info@innoq.com Gewerbestr. 11 CH-6330 Cham Switzerland Phone: +41 41 743 0116