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Note that we have some Incomplete Pages That Require Work on this site:-)
Note that we have some Incomplete Pages That Require Work on this site:-)
Early implementations of agile often seem to hide the need for good design. Most of the time the assumption was that “if you have good people, with a good understanding of design principles then good design will follow.” The Agile Manifesto argued that
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
This has proven to be true - there is a huge benefit in having the Teams do design as they do the work (assuming Teams with strong technical skills). And it has worked for many situations. But as you have more and more Teams contributing to the single solution, or as people started to apply agile into more and more existing IT situations, it became increasingly clear that something more was required. The question then became
“How do we leverage this emergent property of design, while also keeping overall guidelines in place and doing some level of look ahead planning?”
SAFe in particular recognized the problem and developed the notion of intentional architecture in addition to emergent architecture. One of the key ideas was that for a Train program that the System Architect works with the Teams to build an “architectural runway” of new “enablers” that enables the Train to develop new capabilities better, faster, and cheaper.
The problem with this distinction is that, for many, the idea that we need “intentional” architecture is an excuse to say “the role of the architect does not really change”. This misses the point. The discussion must be more nuanced than this. A couple of examples:
From these example you can see that architects need to adopt a different approach. Part of the problem is caused by the traditional way architects try to address these issues. The mindset of command and control applies in this space as it does in many others. An architect will issue guidelines and demand reviews of designs, for example. From the perspective of the Teams, Architects are often perceived as providing guidelines that do not work in reality and as the place where innovation stops as architectural approval is required, and that is often slow in coming. It’s not that Architects want to be in this position; they are senior people working hard. But that is how it works out.
What we are trying to get to a more collaborative approach for this role, just like we are with any leadership role. Like all agile, there is a mindset shift required from Architects as they a work with agile Teams:
And we are leverage key agile ideas to help us improve the result. From the examples above: