I've had a couple of interesting questions by e-mail recently ... (1) why do so few public speakers talk about software architecture, and doing up front design? ... (2) why do you rarely see this content at software development conferences?
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From one perspective, any discussion about the process of software architecture (i.e. "architecting") should really be seen as fundamental to building software, and something that all software developers should know about already.
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But it's not, and I've shared my reasons for this a thousand times before; e.g.
I do believe that the current lack of architecture thinking, up front design, documentation, UML, modelling, etc is directly attributable to the widespread misinterpretation and misapplication of the agile manifesto though.
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Regardless, the lack of up front design and documentation (diagrams, decisions, etc) is a real-world problem that real-world organisations have right now. I know this because organisations large and small invite me in to help fix such problems.
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In fact, I actually think that *more* organisations are now realising this problem exists, and more will in the future. But it's a long road, because there are so few of us talking about this stuff, and raising awareness ->
For example, competition in the observability space isn’t just making it a vibrantly innovative space (where they are learning from each other), but each player is educating the market about our need for observability, and so expanding the market (readiness/willingness)
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As for this content rarely appearing at conferences ... people want to learn about the cool new things, not the fundamentals. Which will sell more tickets; a talk about servlerless, or the software architecture process? I liked this tweet yesterday ->
Practitioner conference track I’d love to see: criteria is that every talk must still be relevant to attendees / continue giving benefit for the next ten years. (And yet still have some fresh take / new insights). What talks would you put in that track??
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Sadly this is the key point. If “real” software architecture talks sold vast numbers of tickets I’m sure that O’Reilly SA, JAX, GOTO and the other big comferences would pack programmes with them. However yet another intro talk on K8s seems to do better.
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I can’t confirm, at least not for Germany. We’ve been helping run Software Architecture Summit and TAG for a long time, quite successfully – with your participation, as you’ll recall ;) Don’t know whether it’s the format or the market.
Mar 8, 2019 · 6:59 AM UTC
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