Design It!

Evaluate to Learn

Architecture evaluation is a process by which we learn the extent to which an architecture is fit for purpose. A common fallacy when designing software architectures the belief that we should check the architecture only once, at the end of a design phase. If the whole architecture isn’t correct, then everything fails and the implementation can’t start. This thinking is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Architectures are never wholly good or wholly bad. Just like we can’t see the entire architecture in a single view, we also can’t evaluate the whole architecture in a single go. It’s possible for a single component to be well designed, or one area of the architecture to be well understood while others are filled with risk. Not everything ...