This Blog is a kick off to for many writings about architecture in an Agile World. We will explore the topic from all the views possible, in order to gain a better understanding about it. By doing so, we hope to create a community of followers, who would also like to contribute or discuss about this topic.
Xebia is helping many organizations in the Netherlands, France, the United States and India with implementing an agile way of system development. In most of the cases the Scrum method is applied and very good results are achieved. Business and IT are working much closer together, resulting in more quality and much more customer satisfaction. However, lately we also see a trend in problems that seem to occur in (almost) every organization. Software is developed in a fast way with high quality, but it takes forever to get it in production. The more teams are being formed, the more interdependencies between the teams occur (more…)
Tags: Agile, Architecture, Lean
Filed under Agile, Architecture, General, kanban, lean architecture, Requirements Management, Scrum, Scrum, SOA, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Last week I got a presentation for a security device I had never heard about.
Most times this means it is something which is not commodity, or has no real use-case.
But this time I was really impressed. The device is a possible replacement for IBM Datapower XML Security Gateway. But the way they designed the device is totally different.
What CrossCheck networks did was creating a device with just security as main use case. First of all it was an XML gateway, nowadays is does support HTML, XML, SOAP, FTP, JMS and others.
It also translates different flavors of JMS to each other, it can even convert from IBM MQ to JBoss MQ directly.
Tags: Architecture, esb, Middleware, SOA
Filed under Middleware, Security, SOA | 1 Comment »
In my last blog I presented an illustration which shows the two primary aspects of the architects’ role. On one side they play a role in strengthening the heartbeat. On the other side, they play a role in envisioning the future.
The focus in this blog is on the solution architect or application architect. The way the Enterprise architect deals with Scrum will be explored more in detail in a later blog. This blog combined with the previous 3 blogs can be also downloaded as a whitepaper from the Xebia website: http://www.xebia.com/architects_scrum
What is the role of the architect?
Last blog I presented the illustration as shown below. In this blog I will focus on the parts of this illustration in which the solution architect / application architect plays a role
Tags: Agile, Architecture, role, Scrum
Filed under Agile, Architecture, General, lean architecture, Requirements Management, Scrum | 1 Comment »
In my last post I stated that there is a lot of emphasis on the fact that architects have to help to get the scrum team to work better, faster en with more quality. By following the agile values the architect will help “strengthening the heartbeat” of the scrum teams. However the activities of architects should encompass more. In this blog I will explain what this is and how to incorporate this in your way of working with scrum teams.
Tags: Agile, Architecture, Scrum
Filed under Agile, Architecture, General, lean architecture, Process, Scrum | 2 Comments »
This blog is the second of a series of blogs in which I will examine the role of architects in Scrum. Last week I started with the forgotten questions of Scrum. In this blog I will look in more detail to the Agile Manifesto and the agile values.
Architects and the agile values
Most of the literature concerning the role of architects in an agile context focuses on the Agile flow itself and how architects can avoid disturbing that flow. Mike Cohn, in his book “succeeding with agile” makes the distinction between coding & non-coding architects. In where he states that the coding architects will have less trouble finding their new role in de Agile development process.
An architect within a team has to be able to code himself. He is a team member, who has more experience in structuring the application being build compared to other team members. By using that experience he can add value to the team. Scrum has no particular role for non-coding architects. The question rises if this is totally true. (more…)
Tags: Agile, architects, Architecture, Scrum
Filed under Agile, General, lean architecture, Process, Scrum | 5 Comments »
This blog is intended to be the first of a series of blogs in which I will examine the role of architects in Scrum. I will start with what I think that are the forgotten questions of Scrum and in next blogs I will examine how the role of the architect changes, what kind of architects are needed and and which activities architects should be doing to be successful and valuable.
The forgotten questions of Scrum
In the 1960’s Alfred Chandler already wrote that the organization structure of an organization is tightly related to its strategy and based on its organizational processes. In the optimal world according to Chandler: Structure follows processes follows strategy. (more…)
Tags: Agile, Architecture, role of architect, Scrum
Filed under Agile, Architecture, lean architecture, Scrum | 4 Comments »
Over the last 4 month’s we have written a series of blogposts describing 11 principles of Lean Architecture. This post will be the last of the series, the wrap up post.
Tags: Agile, agile architectuur, Architecture, Lean, lean architecture, lean architectuur
Filed under Agile, Architecture, lean architecture | 2 Comments »
This is the eleventh and last post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The eleventh principle we discuss is called “Freedom where possible, standardize where needed“. (more…)
Tags: agile architectuur, Architecture, Lean, lean architecture, lean architectuur
Filed under Agile, Architecture, lean architecture | 2 Comments »
This is the tenth post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The tenth principle we discuss is called “Architecture emerging from Projects“. (more…)
Tags: agile architectuur, Architecture, Lean, lean architecture, lean architectuur
Filed under Agile, Architecture, lean architecture | 1 Comment »
This is the ninth post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The ninth principle we
discuss is “Comprehensible over Comprehensiveness”.
Tags: Agile, agile architectuur, Architecture, lean architecture, lean architectuur
Filed under Agile, Architecture, lean architecture | 5 Comments »