Presentation for Agile Vancouver: Evolution of Software Architectures over Time

Here’s the abstract of my upcoming presentation at “Much Ado About Agile” on Nov. 3rd. Hope to see you there.

Riding Entropy: Evolution of Software Architectures over Time – Patterns, Smells and Interventions

Software architectures have a tendency to change during the software development lifecycle:

• Requirements not foreseen by the original designers necessitate refactoring.
• Time pressure leads to “shortcuts” which are not necessarily compatible with the original idea.
• The intentions of the original architects are no longer known or have been superseded by changes in the business environment.
• Uneven developer skill sets result in different programming styles in different parts of the application.

More often than not, the kind of changes which affect a system’s architecture are side effects rather than deliberate choices. They are caused less by technical factors and more by the business- and organisational environment in which developers operate.

The session explores examples of directions this evolution can take, with an informal attempt to identify some patterns and antipatterns which may help practitioners to direct the process.