Building Evolutionary Architectures, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. 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. Let’s look at a common set of factors that impact your ability to put evolutionary architecture into practice.

Don’t Fight Conway’s Law

In April 1968, Melvin Conway submitted a paper to Harvard Business Review titled “How Do Committees Invent?”. In this paper, Conway introduced the notion that the social structures, particularly the communication paths between people, inevitably influence final product design.

As Conway describes, in the very early stage of the design, a high-level understanding of the system is made to understand how to break down areas of responsibility into different patterns. The way that a group breaks down a problem affects choices that they can make later.

He codified what has become known as Conway’s Law:

Organizations which design systems …​ are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Melvin Conway

As Conway notes, when technologists break down ...