Facilitating Software Architecture

Chapter 17. Fitting the Advice Process Within Your Organization

After all this talk of adopting the architecture advice process, you may have forgotten that it takes place within your wider organization. While that’s not your primary concern at the outset, the decentralized culture and structures of trust and feedback that you collectively rely on will continuously be in contact with other cultures and other ways of organizing within your organization. You’ll need to pay attention to those contact points.

If you don’t figure out what these contact points are and how they interact, collaborate, contradict, and coevolve with your advice process practice, you’ll come into conflict with them. Sadly, because decentralized, trust-based approaches are a less familiar, minority way of organizing, when such conflicts arise, the advice process almost always loses out to creeping bureaucracy and hierarchy.

This final chapter examines those contact points, considering them from the early stages of adopting the advice process. It contains perspectives and strategies for ensuring that your decentralized approach to architecture can coexist or perhaps even coevolve with the surrounding organization. Most importantly, it shows how to avoid their coming into conflict with each other without asking either side to compromise.

The Software Engineering Subculture

The advice process needs to be able to exist within your organization’s current software engineering department for it to be established ...