Conway’s Law

Microservices or Monoliths – Fences and Neighbors

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  At the end of my last post, “What Makes a Monolith Monolithic?”, I stated that I didn’t consider the term “monolithic” to be inherently derogatory. It is, rather, a descriptive term relating to the style of organizing an application’s architecture. Depending on the context the system operates within, a monolithic architectural style could lie […]

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 442

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A new month brings a new appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 442, features Tom’s excellent essay on capability teams (highly recommended!), followed by a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create”. Kim Pries bats cleanup […]

Microservices, Monoliths, and Modularity

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  There are very valid reasons for considering a microservice architecture (MSA) when building/evolving an application. In my opinion, however, forcing modularity isn’t one of those very valid reasons. Just the other day, I saw tweet from Simon Brown saying this same thing: I still like his comment from two years back: “I’ll keep saying […]

Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create

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I’ve mentioned before that the idea of looking at organizations as systems is one that I’ve been focusing on for quite a while now. From a top-down perspective, this makes sense – an organization is a system that works better when it’s component parts (both machine and human) intentionally work together. It also works from […]

Monolithic Applications and Enterprise Gravel

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It’s been almost a year since I’ve written anything about microservices, and while a lot has been said on that subject, it’s one I still monitor to see what new pops up. The opening of a blog post that I read last week caught my attention: Coined by Melvin Conway in 1968, Conway’s Law states: […]

Why whole-enterprise architecture matters

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Why would whole-enterprise architecture matter to an organisation? And what’s the difference between whole-enterprise architecture and other forms of enterprise-architecture? Well, here’s a first-hand case-study that illustrates both those questions… There are four main players in this overall scenario: myself,…

Can you afford microservices?

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Much has been written about the potential benefits of designing applications using microservices. A fair amount has also been written about the potential pitfalls. On this blog, there’s been a combination of both. As I noted in “Are Microservices the Next Big Thing?”: It’s not the technique itself that makes or breaks a design, it’s […]

Full Stack Enterprises (Who Needs Architects?)

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In my last post, “Locking Down the Prisoners: Control, Conflict and Compliance for Organizations”, I returned to a topic that I’ve been touching on periodically over the last year, organizations as systems, which overlaps significantly with the topic of enterprise architecture (not to be confused with enterprise IT architecture of which EA is a superset). […]