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, innoQ @stilkov JUG HH, 7 April 2016
2. DüsseldorfɾBerlinɾFrankfurtɾMünchenɾZürich www.innoq.com
3. 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) ·
4. 1. Over-Generalization Drive
5. Symptom: Seeing commonalities in everything and turning them into generic solutions
6. Phases in a Developer’s Life
7. Phase 1. The Enthusiastic Developer “This stuff is cool - let’s build programs! For real people!”
8. 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
9. Phase 2. The Disillusioned Developer “Oh. Real people have boring problems.”
10. 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
11. Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing
12. Phase 3. The Enthusiastic Architect “Generic solutions! Cool!” Create Thing Find Thing List Thing Edit Thing Delete Thing
13. ‘ ‘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)
14. Phase 4. The Disillusioned Architect KISS YAGNI Lean Minimal viable product Story focus
15. Phase 5. The “Wise” Architect Answer: It depends. Question: *
16. ‘ ‘ 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
17. 2. Domain Allergy
18. Symptom: Treating the domain as a negligible nuisance
19. Application (100%) Configuration 10% The 
 Generic
 Thing
 Machine 90%
20. 80% 20% Functionality: 320% 80% Time/Effort:
21. Configuration The 
 Generic
 Thing
 Machine Customer Developer
22. The benefits of choices already made Microsoft .NET + Visual Studio SAP et. al. Ruby on Rails
23. 3. Obsessive Specialization Disorder
24. Symptom: Believing every problem to be unique, even if it’s been solved 1,000 times
25. 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.
26. 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
27. Symptom: Believing everything needs to be a perfect match to your environment to be usable.
28. 4. Unhealthy Complexity Attraction
29. Symptom: Being so smart you can’t be bothered by simple approaches.
30. Benefits of Complexity > Challenging work > New and interesting experience > Self-esteem > Community > Barrier to entry > Job security
31. 5. Analysis Paralysis
32. Symptom: Taking longer to evaluate than to actually do it
33. 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
34. 6. Innovation Addiction
35. (a.k.a. Phase 0 Fixation)
36. Symptom: Things become progressively less fun the closer you get to production.
37. ‘ ‘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
38. Image Credit: Dan Dickinson, https://flic.kr/p/9mUs73
39. 7. Severe Tunneling Fixation
40. Symptom: Enforcing an architectural approach that clashes with the framework, libraries or tools you use.
41. ‘ ‘I know what I like
    And I like what I know … Genesis
42. 8. Compulsive Spending Syndrome
43. Symptom: Mistaking a high price tag for quality.
44. Symptom: Early success brings in early money brings in illusions of grandeur.
45. (a.k.a. TooMuchMoneyException)
46. 9. Conservatitis
47. Symptom: Sticking with horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE tools because they’re there
48. Symptom: Confusing “easy” with simple, creating accidental complexity
49. simple complex easy hard Rich Hickey, “Simple Made Easy”, http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
50. Symptom: Using fashionable technology because it’s popular (a.k.a. fallacy of argument by authority)
51. 10. Impact Dissonance
52. Symptom: Becoming too detached from the actual system that is being delivered
53. Related:
    Governance Megalomania
54. Symptom: Believing everything has to be approved by you to ensure it meets architecture standards
55. What architects want do Shape strategy 30 % Make important decisions 30 % Mentor developers 20 % Explore technologies 20 %
56. What others think architects do Slow down development 20 % Pick the wrong tools 20 % Refuse to learn from devs 20 % Define annoying rules 40 %
57. ‘ ‘“Architect” is Latin
    for “Can’t code anymore.” Ted Neward
58. What architects actually do Do technical stuff 5 % Act as salespeople 30 % Try to be involved 35 % Defend architecture 30 %
59. Image Credit: Sean Michael Ragan, http://flic.kr/p/8XEm6L
60. I don’t have an answer …
61. … so here’s one, anyway
62. Balance
63. 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 %
64. 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