Idealized architecture: Increasing optionality by designing for right now

Description

Provision a new server in minutes or seconds. Deliver working software every two weeks. Deliver continuously.

While techniques like CI/CD and Agile allow us to experiment and deliver software more rapidly (and think in shorter increments of time), those tools are only useful when guided by a long-term technology strategy designed to produce optionality and allow for evolution.

As architects, our “right now” is often quite long, covering the span of months or even years. So how do we sensitize ourselves to the information coming in from the frontlines and from technologists with a potentially much shorter “right now” of maybe hours or days (e.g., help desk workers, tier-one operators, and junior developers)? How can we train our ears to recognize different time spans and translate those (sometimes noisy) stories into valuable information that informs the architecture and design of our software systems?

Cat Swetel reviews research on workers’ time spans, then shares observations on how workers’ concepts of the present are changing as software architectures and software development methodologies evolve. Cat concludes by examining these trends in terms of their impact on the way we architect and experience sociotechnical systems.