Facilitating Software Architecture

Chapter 7. Replacing Hierarchy with Decentralized Trust

Replacing your existing approach to architecture with the architecture advice process is a significant change. In Part I, I described how it affects your software architecture practice and who practices it. In summary, the architecture advice process:

• Creates a space for decentralized deciding, supporting, and governing the process as it happens

• Restores flow to delivery of software and bakes in fast feedback

• Unlocks latent skills and develops hidden talents through individual and team learning

ADRs are a core element for the success of the advice process in the postrevolutionary world. You need both the advice process and ADRs to succeed at this alternative approach to software architecture practice. As essential as the architecture advice process and ADRs are, though, they may not be sufficient on their own.

This chapter describes how responsibility and accountability for architectural decisions shift when using the advice process. I’ll show how the advice process replaces traditional architectural governance, but I’ll also explain how it is still compatible with wider enterprise architecture frameworks. I’ll then describe how the social contract and ADRs’ explicit nature forge a path between the two extremes of recklessness and reticence, opening a space for architecture practice. I’ll cover the qualities of that space created for the practice of architecture, an open space for a generative culture of trust and ...