Software Architecture in Practice (SEI Series in Software Engineering)

Requirements

Architects today are faced with a nonstop and ever-increasing stream of feature requests and bugs to fix, driven by customer and business needs and by competitive pressures. If architects aren’t paying attention to the modularity of their system (and, no, microservices are not a panacea here), that system will quickly become an anchor—hard to understand, change, debug, and modify, and weighing down the business.

Taming complexity

While the level of abstraction in systems is increasing—we can and do regularly use many sophisticated services, blissfully unaware of how they are implemented—the complexity of the systems we are being asked to create is increasing at least as quickly.

This is an arms race, and the architects aren’t winning! Architecture has always been about taming complexity, and that just isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Employee changes

The meteoric growth (and unprecedented levels of employee turnover) that characterizes the world of information systems means that no one understands everything in any real-world system. Just being smart and working hard aren’t good enough.

Quality attributes

Despite having tools that automate much of what we used to do ourselves—think about all of the orchestration, deployment, and management functions baked into Kubernetes, for example—we still need to understand the quality attribute properties of these systems that we depend upon, and we need to understand the emergent quality attribute properties when we combine systems together.

Most quality attributes—performance, security, availability, safety, and so on—are susceptible to “weakest link” problems, and those weakest links may only emerge and bite us when we compose systems. Without a guiding hand to ward off disaster, the composition is very likely to fail. That guiding hand belongs to an architect, regardless of their title.