Strategic Tech

APRIL 11, 2021

The microservices era has been good for software architecture. A domain service builds on the basic definition of a microservice: it’s a loosely-coupled, independently deployable element of software architecture which is owned by a single team. I remember when the idea of multiple databases was punishable by death.

Software Architecture 52

Software Architecture Architecture Design Games 52

Strategic Tech

JULY 29, 2021

If you would like to learn or practice how to break up a large business into domains and use them as the foundation for your software architecture and team organization, I have created a strategic domain-driven design kata that you may find useful. Design review is basically a code review but for architecture.

Design 52

Design Software Architecture Architecture Strategy 52

Strategic Tech

FEBRUARY 19, 2020

I’ve been disappointed for a long time with the way in which companies organise software development teams. I remember as a young, naive software developer, I assumed there would be structured processes and patterns similar to those used for designing a software architecture.

Architecture 64

Architecture Strategy Design Software Architecture 64

Strategic Tech

MAY 9, 2020

If you want to get started with Strategic DDD to gain deeper insights into your domain and to align your software architecture with your domain, you can use this Miro board: [link] No sign up, installation, or payment is required to view the board. In order to use the tools you will need to copy them onto a board of your own.

Software Architecture 59

Software Architecture Architecture Design Technology 59

Strategic Tech

JULY 20, 2021

Reading Strategy Patterns One of the techniques I use frequently for visualising business, product, and technology strategy is Core Domain Charts. Maybe they weren’t invited for political reasons…. This technique plots the business differentiation and domain complexity of a business’s domains.

Strategy 52

Strategy Innovation Technology Technology 52

Strategic Tech

SEPTEMBER 18, 2021

In companies with many teams and many millions of lines of code, including a lot of legacy, there are endless things that can be improved in the product, software, and organization. It can guid you through your first few cycles of discovery, strategy, and implementation and then you’ll be in a good place to guide yourself.

Strategy 97

Strategy Technology Technology Design 97

Strategic Tech

MARCH 16, 2021

There are a few qualities that differentiate average from high performing software engineering organisations. I believe that attitude towards the design of code and architecture is one of them. The same mindset should also be applied to architecture; involve the whole team and challenge the small details.

Software Engineering 80

Software Engineering Design Engineering Software 80

Strategic Tech

APRIL 27, 2019

This organisational pattern can be mirrored in the software architecture, emphasising the sociotechnical nature of systems. While it is nice to go out of your way to please others, the resulting compromises to the software architecture can lead to dangerous sociotechnical side-effects.

Software Architecture 58

Software Architecture Architecture Government Design 58

Strategic Tech

JUNE 28, 2022

But without investment in strong technical practices that keep code healthy and evolvable, you will never be able to go fast, regardless of how teams are organized. Teams need to be able to build and deploy software very easily. If you want to go fast, you need a codebase that can be easily modified.

Processing 52

Processing Architecture Strategy Infrastructure 52

Strategic Tech

JULY 18, 2018

Lack of accountability leads to unmaintainable software that grows harder and harder to change. As our legacy systems become less maintainable the negative spiral begins: the code is hard to evolve, nobody enjoys working on it, features take ages to deliver, politics ramp up….

Design 40

Design Architecture Software Architecture Systems 40

Strategic Tech

JUNE 4, 2019

One of the key decisions we need to make in software architecture and in our organisations is when and where to create shared services and organise teams to build them. Typically they deploy software once a quarter and love to have code freezes. Creating a shared dependency can boost the productivity of downstream teams.

Software Architecture 40

Software Architecture Efficiency Innovation Architecture 40

Strategic Tech

AUGUST 1, 2019

Along with tangled code, this could mean a large scale coordination across many teams if the notifications approach changes. It needs to know when to send notifications and what type of notification to send. Is it sensible to have notifications logic scattered throughout all of the bounded contexts?

Architecture 40

Architecture Design Engineering Best Practices 40

Strategic Tech

JULY 22, 2019

In Domain-Driven Design, a large system is decomposed into bounded contexts , which become natural boundaries in code as microservices and as teams in the organisation. This is the question I get asked the most, so I’ve put together this article describing a workshop recipe you can use. There is no shortcut to identifying good boundaries.

Design 76

Design Systems Strategy Processing 76

Strategic Tech

JUNE 23, 2018

Loosely-coupled teams enabled by loosely-coupled software architecture is one of the strongest predictors of continuous delivery performance and organizational scaling. Whenever a team starts on a piece of work they should own all of the code and infrastructure that needs to change in order to deliver the work.

Systems 40

Systems Social Media Design Media 40

Strategic Tech

DECEMBER 2, 2018

Multiple teams who must work very closely together even though they really don’t want to or have any reason to if not for the organisational coupling necessitated by the technical coupling in the code. To get you started, you can find a collection of heuristics on my site.

Efficiency 40

Efficiency Speed Innovation Transportation 40

Strategic Tech

DECEMBER 12, 2019

In software, reacting to unforeseen circumstances in real-time is not possible. We have to specify with great precision in code exactly what our business rules are, and the computer will apply them exactly as we tell it to. But there is a problem? Hope to see you there.

Healthcare 10

Healthcare Software Architecture Database Software 10

Smashing Magazine

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

And that in order to achieve this strategy implementing a culture of performance throughout the organization is a must. And once the teams started working off of the knowledge, it meant organizing performance-focused design and code reviews, training and education, plus providing tools and assets to support these ongoing efforts.

Website 126

Website Performance Google Media 126

Tasktop

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Scott Havens, Senior Director of Engineering at Mode Operandi, highlighted the benefits of event-based systems over legacy approaches, and how software architecture should be just as beautiful as the clothes on sale. Just look at how ugly that service-oriented architecture is!” He had a strategy. He laid out a mission.

DevOps 8

DevOps Education Innovation Metrics 8