Building Evolutionary Architectures, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Automating Architectural Governance

Architects are tasked with designing the structure of software systems as well as defining many of the development and engineering practices. However, another important job for architects is governing aspects of the building of software, including design principles, good practices, and identified pitfalls to avoid.

Traditionally, architects had few tools to allow them to enforce their governance policies outside manual code reviews, architecture review boards, and other inefficient means. However, with the advent of automated fitness functions, we provide architects with new sets of capabilities. In this chapter, we describe how architects can use the fitness functions created to evolve software to also create automated governance policies.

Fitness Functions as Architectural Governance

The idea that led to this book was the metaphorical mash-up between software architecture and practices from the development of genetic algorithms described in Chapter 2, focusing on the core idea of how architects can create software projects that successfully evolve rather than degrade over time. The results of that initial idea blossomed into the myriad ways we describe fitness functions and their application.

However, while it wasn’t part of the original conception, we realized that the mechanics of evolutionary architecture heavily overlap architectural governance, especially the idea of automating governance, which itself represents the evolution ...