Software Architecture: The Hard Parts

Chapter 1. What Happens When There Are No “Best Practices”?

Why does a technologist like a software architect present at a conference or write a book? Because they have discovered what is colloquially known as a “best practice,” a term so overused that those who speak it increasingly experience backlash. Regardless of the term, technologists write books when they have figured out a novel solution to a general problem and want to broadcast it to a wider audience.

But what happens for that vast set of problems that have no good solutions? Entire classes of problems exist in software architecture that have no general good solutions, but rather present one messy set of trade-offs cast against an (almost) equally messy set.

Software developers build outstanding skills in searching online for solutions to a current problem. For example, if they need to figure out how to configure a particular tool in their environment, expert use of Google finds the answer.

But that’s not true for architects.

For architects, many problems present unique challenges because they conflate the exact environment and circumstances of your organization—what are the chances that someone has encountered exactly this scenario and blogged it or posted it on Stack Overflow?

Architects may have wondered why so few books exist about architecture compared to technical topics like frameworks, APIs, and so on. Architects rarely experience common problems but constantly struggle with decision making in novel situations. ...