(Admittedly, @nicolefv, @jezhumble and @realgenekim didn’t help when they statistically proved that he might have been onto something with all that de-coupling and team-alignment…)
Software architecture is in crisis, and the way to fix it is a hefty dose of anarchy.

(Admittedly, @nicolefv, @jezhumble and @realgenekim didn’t help when they statistically proved that he might have been onto something with all that de-coupling and team-alignment…)
I think he saved us; bringing us back to the path of value-delivery and independent services, but now with added independent teams.

(See https://t.co/B2hWmXhIqe if you need convincing)


*Shudder*
And consequently many, many #microservices adoptions failed; with #microservices themselves getting an undeserved bad name in the process.
What we need is a workable way to approach them, and in the process realise the associated benefits of both team autonomy and improvements in system architecture.
I’ll describe what it is and you could do it. Hopefully you’ll see how it offers the best (only?) way out of this mess.

Straight away that means how we are used to doing architecture, via all-powerful architects taking all the decisions, is going to have to stop.
\u201cYou may think in describing anarchism as a theory of organisation I am propounding a deliberate paradox: \u2018anarchy\u2019 you may consider to be, by definition, the _opposite_ of organisation. In fact, however, \u2018anarchy\u2019 means the absence of government, the absence of _authority_. ..."
— Andrew Harmel-Law \U0001f3e1 (@al94781) November 29, 2020
(As @Grady_Booch has said “architecture represents the set of significant design decisions that shape the form and the function of a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”)
So the first test is can an #AnarchisticArchitecture deliver on this?
The answer is "Yes".
More from Software
Developer productivity, y'all. It is a three TRILLION dollar opportunity, per the stripe report.
Eng managers and directors, we have got to stop asking for "more headcount" and start treating this like the systems problem that it is. https://t.co/XJ0CkFdgiO
If you are getting barely more than 50% productivity out of your very expensive engineers, I can pretty much guarantee you cannot hire your way out of this resourcing issue. 😐
(the stripe report is here:
Say you've got a strategic initiative that 3 engineers to build and support it. Well, they're going to be swimming in the same muddy pipeline as everyone else at ~50%, so you're actually gotta source, hire and train 6, er make that 7 (gonna need another manager too now)...
...which actually understates the problem, because each person you add also adds friction and overhead to the system. Communication, coordination all get harder and processes get more complex and elaborate, etc.
So we could hire 7 people, or we could patch up our sociotechnical system to lose say only 25% productivity to tech debt, instead of 42%? 🤔
By my calculations, that would reclaim 3 engineers worth of capacity given a team of just 17-18 people.
Eng managers and directors, we have got to stop asking for "more headcount" and start treating this like the systems problem that it is. https://t.co/XJ0CkFdgiO

When people often have to spend weeks just to get a local development environment up, there is a lot to improve. \U0001f641
— Daniel Schildt (@autiomaa) December 20, 2020
If you are getting barely more than 50% productivity out of your very expensive engineers, I can pretty much guarantee you cannot hire your way out of this resourcing issue. 😐
(the stripe report is here:
Say you've got a strategic initiative that 3 engineers to build and support it. Well, they're going to be swimming in the same muddy pipeline as everyone else at ~50%, so you're actually gotta source, hire and train 6, er make that 7 (gonna need another manager too now)...
...which actually understates the problem, because each person you add also adds friction and overhead to the system. Communication, coordination all get harder and processes get more complex and elaborate, etc.
So we could hire 7 people, or we could patch up our sociotechnical system to lose say only 25% productivity to tech debt, instead of 42%? 🤔
By my calculations, that would reclaim 3 engineers worth of capacity given a team of just 17-18 people.