Building Evolutionary Architectures, 2nd Edition

Preface

When we wrote the first edition of Building Evolutionary Architectures in 2017, the idea of evolving software architecture was still somewhat radical. During one of her first presentations about the subject, Rebecca was approached afterward by someone accusing her of being professionally irresponsible for suggesting that software architecture can evolve over time—​after all, the architecture is the thing that never changes.

However, as reality teaches us, systems must evolve to meet new demands of their users and to reflect changes in the constantly shifting software development ecosystem.

When the first edition was published, few tools existed to take advantage of the techniques we describe. Fortunately, the software development world keeps evolving, including many more tools to make building evolutionary architectures easier.

The Structure of This Book

We changed the structure from the first edition to more clearly delineate the two main topics: the engineering practices for evolving software systems and the structural approaches that make it easier.

In Part I, we define the various mechanisms and engineering practices that teams can use to implement the goals of evolutionary architecture, including techniques, tools, categories, and other information readers need to understand this topic.

Software architecture also involves structural design, and some design decisions make evolution (and governance) easier. We cover this in Part II, which also includes coverage of ...