Lean Architecture for Agile Software Development

Chapter 10. Epilog

As for computer professionals routinely thinking and acting with long-term responsibility, that may come gradually as a by-product of the Year 2000 comeuppance, or life extension, of environmental lessons, and of globalization (island Earth).

—The Clock of the Long Now, p. 86.

The computer code we are offhandedly writing today could become the deeply embedded standards for centuries to come. Any programmer or system designer who takes that realization on and feels the full karmic burden, gets vertigo.

—Jaron Lanier quoted in The Clock of the Long Now, p. 120.

Christopher Alexander, an urban planner and architect of the built world, talks about great architecture as being the result of millions of selfless acts of individuals. He, too, understood the Lean Secret of a whole team:

It is essential only that the people of a society, together, all the millions of them, not just professional architects, design all the millions of places. There is no other way that human variety, and the reality of specific human lives, can find their way into the structure of the places. (Alexander 1979, p. 164)

This quote, together with the quotes that open this chapter and dozens more like them, underscore the weightiness of software architecture in the future of humanity. In his address at OOPSLA 1996, Alexander charged the software discipline with the future of beauty and morality in our world—goals that come through our own architectural strivings.

As regards building architecture, Alexander ...