Building Evolutionary Architectures

Chapter 8. Putting Evolutionary Architecture into Practice

Finally, we look at the steps required to implement the ideas around evolutionary architecture. This includes both technical and business concerns, including organization and team impacts. We also suggest where to start and how to sell these ideas to your business.

Organizational Factors

The impact of software architecture has a surprisingly wide breadth on a variety of factors not normally associated with software, including team impacts, budgeting, and a host of others.

Teams structured around domains rather than technical capabilities have several advantages when it comes to evolutionary architecture and exhibit some common characteristics.

Cross-Functional Teams

Domain-centric teams tend to be cross-functional, meaning every project role is covered by someone on the project. The goal of a domain-centric team is to eliminate operational friction. In other words, the team has all the roles needed to design, implement, and deploy their service, including traditionally separate roles like operations. But these roles must change to accommodate this new structure, which includes the following roles:

Business Analysts

Must coordinate the goals of this service with other services, including other service teams.

Architecture

Design architecture to eliminate inappropriate coupling that complicates incremental change. Notice this doesn’t require an exotic architecture like microservices. A well-designed modular monolithic ...