Software Architecture as Code

Over the past few years, I’ve been distilling software architecture down to its essence, helping organisations adopt a lightweight style of software architecture as code that complements agile approaches. This includes doing “just enough” up front design to understand the significant structural elements of the software architecture as code, some lightweight sketches to communicate that vision to the team, identifying the highest priority risks and mitigating them with concrete experiments. Software architecture as code is inherently about technical leadership, stacking the odds of success in your favour and ensuring that everybody is heading in the same direction.

But it’s 2015 and, with so much technology at our disposal, we’re still manually drawing software architecture diagrams in tools like Microsoft Visio. Furthermore, these diagrams often don’t reflect the implementation in code, and vice versa. This session will look at why this happens and how to resolve the conflict between software architecture as code through the use of architecturally-evident coding styles and the representation of software architecture models as code.