🖐 5 Things Every Developer Must Know about Software Architecture

1. Software Architecture Isn’t About Big Design Upfront ☝️

Big designs upfront are usually done in waterfall models of software development.

• The waterfall model is predicted to be bad by its own inventor :)

The upfront design should be a basic, good one done with an iterative and incremental process.

When Do We Stop The Architecture Planning? ⛔️

When we have a solid understanding of the following aspects:

• The significant architectural drivers
  • Cost, Response Time, etc...
• Requirements.
• Constraints.
• The context and scope of the product.
• The significant design choices.
• Technology used.
• Is our application a Monolith or is a set of Microservices?
• The risks associated with the product.

2. Every Software Team/Product Needs To Consider Architecture And Needs To Have A Technical Leader ✌️

This is crucial to have consistent patterns in the product.

3. What's The Software Architect Role About 👨‍🔧

• Coding.
• Keeping an eye on what’s going on with the code base.
• Coaching.
• Collaboration with others to incrementally draw the architecture of the application.

It’s a continuous role that spans the life of the project.

4. An Architect Doesn’t Need To Use UML 📐

There are several other tools that enable us to create architecture diagrams using GUIs or even using code.

• C4-PlantUML (code based)
• Diagrams.net (GUI based)
• Structurizr (both code and GUI based)

5. A Good Software Architecture Enables Agility ❤️

Credits 🙌

This post has been prepared using the lecture of Simon Brown Five Things Every Developer Should Know about Software Architecture