Beiträge

As IT consultants, we try to solve problems on a daily basis. This is our normal workload, our daily business. But this is not our only duty, we need to keep up with the technical evolution, we need to learn continuously to satisfy our customers. This is why we read about new things in blogs, visit meetups in our free time and go to conferences (like the one this post is inspired by "down to earth architecture" by Uwe Friedrichsen @SAS 2019 in Munich). We are influenced by all these channels and need to be careful how to use the knowledge in our working environments or we end up with one of these stereotypical types of bad software architecture:

Stackoverflow architecture (or google-driven architecture)

We have a problem to overcome in our software system and are not familiar with the topic. Therefore, we search the internet for books, blogs or tutorials. We find a slightly related solved problem on Stackoverflow and copy the solution without much thinking.
We are not talking about copy-pasting code here, but rather abstract solutions like "where should ids be generated in CQRS." We do not want to downplay the absolute knowledge found on Stackoverflow, but we should be sure the solution we found actually fits the problem and/or adapt accordingly.

Conference-driven architecture

Whatever conferences you visit, you always feel attached to your track or topic. These could be things like micro-services, domain-driven design or EventSourcing. While these are very good solutions to their respective problems, they might solve problems you aren’t even encountering in your domain or there are other good solutions.
Additionally, most of the time, we are not starting an application from scratch. If we visit conferences regularly and always incorporate the hot topics, we end up with a mess after some time.

Hype-driven architecture

Similar to the conference-driven architecture, we find the hype-driven architecture. Every (new) application needs to be distributed into micro services. Of course, that’s not true. There are huge benefits in following a micro-service (or SCS) approach, but there are also challenges, constrains and problems! Learning and especially applying a framework is often useful. However, you should not force a framework onto your system if there is no need for it! Most of the time, learning how to solve your domain’s problems (e.g. how to handle consistency in distributed systems or mastering personal data and GDPR) is more beneficial than being a master of a framework.

Strategic architecture (aka PowerPoint architecture)

Usually, when you join a project there are some PowerPoint slides describing the architecture of the system or application. You go through these, but your colleagues advise against doing so: "these are for compliance" or "we made this for the latest steering committee". When the slides diverge too much from the actual structure or code, misunderstandings are about to happen! While there are reasons to display different aspects of your software to different stakeholders, try to minimize this.

Tunnel-vision architecture

As a software engineer or architect, you need to work on some topics in excessive detail. We need to build walls around us and analyze problems in-depth! Occasionally, we need to look around, too. With more experience, we learn to balance the extremes. Especially for younger developers, there is a risk of over-engineering one detail or creating problems on other ends of the system.

Blast-from-the-past architecture

Technology advances, business models evolve and the underlying software architecture needs to do this, too. There are challenges that a lot of software components face; an example is versioning of web APIs. A versioning concept of system-to-system APIs with /v1/, /v2/, /v3/ might work for applications that had a release once a month and a breaking change once a year, but probably won’t work for a fast paced API in an API economy where time-to-marked is a driving factor.

Big design up front

In a world with perfect information, where all user needs and every aspect of your system are clear, Big Design Up Front (BDUF) could work. BDUF is closely related to the waterfall approach of developing software. This clashes with the agile world. Similar to communism and capitalism, BDUF and agile development are two paradigms where neither is inherently bad or good – it’s just that one is more practical in real life. Especially in a fast-moving world where innovation is key, agile development won the battle and there is no place for BDUF architecture.

One-size-fits-it-all architecture

Develop your application as a polyglot, domain-driven micro-service architecture with CQRS and EventSourcing. Use Kubernetes as container orchestrator with Helm for deployment, Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and GIT as source control system. Frontend is Angular, machine learning is done in python and we use Mongo and Cassandra for persistency. Caching is done through redis and the whole application needs to be cloud agnostic and conform to all cloud native principles. While this is a noble approach and a turn-on for software engineers, this might not suite our business needs in any way. We could solve many problems with this technology selection, but we are likely over-engineering and not optimizing our efforts.

Accidental architecture

Remember the cone of uncertainty? When you start developing a product, about everything is blurry. You don’t know the user-needs; you don’t know the scale of your application and so on. At this stage, you might not be able to find solutions to some problems as you cannot answer essential questions. At this point, you need to act accordingly! Work with interfaces, adapters and libraries that can be switched later easily or don’t put too much effort in some components as you will either replace them later or implement a more sophisticated version anyways.
Don’t just "do it" or you will end up with a mess of decisions that nobody wanted to make. Another way accidental architecture happens is the development team is either unaware of or under-experienced to identify key-issues.

How do we make sure not to end up with one of this? I’ll look for a more detailed answer in another article, but it boils down to this: we should ask why we need architecture initially.
We have requirements, constrains, problems etc. We figure out solutions (for example with an approach like "orient – explore – evaluate – support" from Uwe Friedrichsen). When we follow this path, we protect our systems from the types of bad architecture above. As unlikely as it seems, if we end up with an architecture that is similar to the ones above, it’s fine. We engineered it with the right intentions. Additionally, learn when to not use certain solutions and follow Uwe Friedrichsen’s advices:

  • Think holistically
  • Resist hyper-specialization
  • Get a T-shape profile
  • Leave your comfort zone once in a while
  • Understand your domain
  • Don’t fall for hypes
  • Cope with technology explosion
  • Master the foundation design
  • Don’t overact