Software Design X-Rays

Clean and Dirty Architectures

A specific architectural style isn’t bad per se. Layers, DCI, and package by component all have their pros and cons. An architecture is good when it supports the changes we want to make to the system and, as we’ve seen, both the type of changes and the organization responsible for implementing them are likely to shift over time. This means that your architecture has to evolve and respond to changing circumstances, which inevitably means reworking the existing building blocks.

In this chapter we discussed the perils of a system rewrite and its consequences. From there we picked up the loose ends from Chapter 7, ​Beyond Conway’s Law​, as we dissected layered architectures. As we saw, a layered architecture will always ...