On the implications of defining the architecture after you build the product -- part II
After my previous post introducing Post-Architecture, I received a bunch of positive feedback, as well as enquiries from people wanting to know more. So I figured a follow-up was in order. Feel free to ask questions here as well as on Mastodon!
I assume you're referring to this blog series: https://medium.com/prospa-technology/emerging-vs-intentional-architecture-385071ae5d75 ?
I wasn't aware of it, and it seems to have some insightful observations! There's definitely some overlap, but by the looks of it, I think I will diverge quite a bit with my next post. I think I'm pretty aligned on the "One-Way Decisions" vs "Two-Way Decisions" part. A One-Way decision in my mind would be, which programming language or framework do we use? Do we use REST or GraphQL?
But it doesn't really go into how to deal with Two-Way decisions, apart from saying to trust your developers. And I think it kinda glosses over the part that things that may appear to be Two-Way decisions initially may actually be closer to One-Way decisions if you continue to build on them. So where that blog still focuses quite a bit on the process, I think I want to shift the focus a bit more to the technical side (so far I've mostly laid down the values that inform the technical direction), especially when it comes to Two-Way decisions. I wasn't thinking about covering One-Way decisions much, but rather on how to shape everyday coding to be more in alignment with Post/Emerging architecture so that you can avoid the Two-Way decisions that in retrospect aren't as much of a Two-Way decision as you'd hope.
I will read that post sometime (maybe). I wasn't really referring to some well defined thing, but rather to something that happens naturally when complex software development is done right. Quasi-scientific: make assumptions, build the thing, test assumptions, update assumptions, rinse and repeat. The "architecture" ends up being the collected knowledge about the system which emerges from the development.
Something like that anyway. Interested to read about One and Two Way decisions.
Ah, fair :) then yeah, I’d say it’s pretty aligned with emerging architecture, just that I’m trying to define the values (and in the next post, technical guidelines based on those values) to (hopefully!) help you make the right decisions as you’re working on an emerging architecture.