#eavoices

Cynicism is Not a Skill

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For six weeks and with about $10,000 I had toiled to create an additional bathroom in my previous home just in time to host some relatives during the holidays. I only had time to throw one of our better bath towels over the curtain rod as this element…

Cynicism is Not a Skill

by

For six weeks and with about $10,000 I had toiled to create an additional bathroom in my previous home just in time to host some relatives during the holidays. I only had time to throw one of our better bath towels over the curtain rod as this ele…

Mapping Agile Architecture

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Jason Bloomberg recently published a mind map for Agile Architecture. It’s a nice map that sketches top level thinking and I welcome that. It prompted me to do a drill down.

Mind maps are useful in that they are, by definition free form and intended to support brain storming. The downside is obvious – they are generally inconsistent and cause modelers’ intense frustration! Caveat emptor over, I fully agree with Jason that we need a dual interpretation of Agile  – that is Agile practices and Agile Architecture, and I have written about this on many occasions. Also that the entire motivation is about business agility. On this last point my mind map is clearly a little more technical than Jason’s, and on reflection I think that is because it’s essential to converge the business and technology concerns.

For example, the map suggests a strong capability centric approach to interpret the business morphology. However this is insufficient; the technology must also establish appropriate levels of implementation independence that will facilitate the pluggability of business capabilities. Similarly you might think that considerations regarding the platform and delivery technology (such as MDA/MDD) are irrelevant to business concerns. However the platform and platform delivery technology are potentially massive drivers of rapid iteration and ongoing change, because they encapsulate common application level infrastructure and common services, so understanding the “business” standardization and localization model is crucial to delivering agility through this structure.

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Scaling Agile means Scalable Architecture

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With the growing popularity of Agile, mainly in applying Scrum for IT development, issues need to be tackled relating to scaling up the development effort. Scrum came to birth in small teams that had a lot of mandate, typically 3 to 10 person teams. Now we see Scrum used for major efforts, involving hundreds of […]

How Do You Measure Up?

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One of my life-long idols, Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying, “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” Can you point to a specific situation where you have changed your mind? On the topic of a…

Architect or Coach?

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Is it just me, or are others finding the Enterprise Architect role shifting towards ‘Coach/Facilitator’? 
These days I find I’m most attracted to Tweets about workshop facilitation and business analysis techniques rather than anything discussing Enterprise Architecture: frameworks, methods and tools. 
Here’s a few links I’d recommend for those interested in the former.