Shades of Conway's Law

In short, Conway's Law says any organisation that designs a system will come up with a system design that copies the organisational communication structures. Over the years, many individuals rephrased Conway's Law in various ways. Every paraphrase brings new insights and non-negligible consequences. Sometimes they give the impression of contradicting each other. However, in the end, they all come to the same conclusion. The organisation and the system keep each other in balance. Modifying the organisation will have an impact on the system. Modifying the system will have an impact on the organisation. Not considering that will cause friction in the organisation or the system with dramatic consequences. To be competitive as an organisation in the market, and to effectively design the right thing our customers expect us to deliver, we'd better understand and take advantage of this. About Thierry de Pauw: Thierry is a lean IT Engineer at the fintech startup Abbove. On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm for optimising IT delivery while reducing stress, burnout and fatigue. From time to time he is asked to conduct technology due diligence for investors to review the technology capabilities of organisations. Thierry is a CI/CD advocate and jack-of-all-trades. Instead of balancing quality & delivery, he believes and practices that better quality is actually a way to more and better deliveries.

Conway's Law Design Video

Oct 14 2024

 A Philosophical Look at System Dynamics

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Spring of 1977. In this lecture, Donella Meadows takes on a more philosophical concept. How can we bring ourselves to be aware of the assumptions we make as systems thinkers? She asserts that models are a set of assumptions. Donella Meadows defines some of these system dynamics assumptions (such as causal relationships and feedback loops) in this video.

Abstraction Philosophy Video

Apr 25 2024

 Designing Fault-Tolerant Software with Control System Transparency

GN&C Fault Protection Fundamentals by Robert Rasmussen, who works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is an organization that works closely with NASA on designing spacecraft. GN&C is guidance, navigation, and control. These are the main software systems here. This paper actually distills a ton of experience spent with really thinking through how to build really fault tolerant systems into some core principles.

Architecture Disributed Systems Video

Mar 5 2024

 Granularity & Communication for Microservice Architectures

Architects struggle in modern distributed architectures with two Hard Parts: finding the appropriate service granularity and determining the correct communication styles between services. This talk introduces a new technique for performing tradeoff analysis for microservices architectures around both static and dynamic coupling. Static coupling helps determine the proper granularity by applying integrators and disintegrators. Dynamic coupling helps architects understand the interplay between communication (synchronous versus asynchronous), consistency (atomic versus eventual), and coordination (orchestration versus choreography), along with guidelines on when to choose particular communication styles. In this talk, Neal provides architects with the nomenclature and patterns to understand these difficult aspects of microservices and related architectures.

Architecture Disributed Systems Microservices Video

Oct 5 2023

 The lost art of software design

“Big design up front is dumb. Doing no design up front is even dumber.” This quote epitomises what I’ve seen during our journey from “big design up front” in the 20th century, to “emergent design” and “evolutionary architecture” in the 21st. In their desire to become “agile”, many teams seem to have abandoned architectural thinking, upfront design, documentation, diagramming, and modelling. In many cases, this is a knee-jerk reaction to the heavy bloated processes of times past, and in others, it’s a misinterpretation and misapplication of the agile manifesto. As a result, many of the software design activities I witness these days are very high-level and superficial in nature. The resulting output, typically an ad hoc sketch on a whiteboard, is usually ambiguous and open to interpretation, leading to a situation where the underlying solution can’t be communicated, assessed, or reviewed. If you’re willing to consider that upfront design is about creating a sufficient starting point, rather than creating a perfect end-state, you soon realise that a large amount of the costly rework and “refactoring” seen on many software development teams can be avoided. Join me for a discussion about the lost art of software design, and how we can reintroduce it to help teams scale and move faster.

Design Video

Aug 13 2023

 I Made Everything Loosely Coupled. Does My App Fall Apart?

Integrating systems provides many benefits, from seamless user experiences, consolidated data for better insights, or interacting with partner ecosystems. And the modern cloud applications that we are building are fine-grained and thus inherently interconnected. Despite having connected systems for decades, some of the fundamental concepts of partial failure, eventual consistency, or idempotency still challenge many developers. This session tackles the nuances of integrated systems, such as messages vs. events, thinking in integration patterns, whether loose coupling is always better, and how cloud automation can change the way you think about integration.

Architecture Microservices Video

Feb 27 2023

 Software Architecture by Example

Where do architecture styles come from? Do architects retreat to an ivory tower to decide what the Next Big Thing will be? No–new capabilities constantly appear in the software development ecosystem, and clever architects figure out new ways to leverage the new building blocks, leading to new named architecture styles which are only named after they have existed for a while. This is similar to art and cultural movements, how Victorianism became Modernism. In this keynote, Neal traces the similarities between architecture styles and cultural movements, how each affect the other, and points towards how Metamodernism will inform architecture, corporations, and individual workers in a fundamental way. Note to organizers: This keynote covers technical details from both my books _Fundamentals of Software Architecture and Software Architecture: The Hard Parts to illustrate the larger observations about both software architecture and the profession of software engineer. This keynote is more philoshopical than the Software Architecture: The Hard Parts keynote, ending with a call to action that architects and developers must become aware of the impact of ethics in seemingly technical decisions and act accordingly to improve rather than degrade the world. Neal Ford Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a software company and a community of passionate, purpose-led individuals, delivering technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. He speaks at many conferences.

Architecture Microservices Video

Feb 15 2023

 Strategic Domain Driven Design Tools for Non-DDD People

DDD has a reputation for being esoteric and hard to grasp for newcomers. So the community has been working hard to simplify the user experience for people new to DDD by providing practical tools like the Bounded Context Canvas which even people with no prior DDD experience can benefit from to design loosely-coupled microservices. These tools will provide you with instant value. You can use them right away on the systems you are building. The tools also help you on the path to mastery of DDD. And all of the tools are open source and creative commons, so nobody is trying to sell you anything.

DDD Video

Feb 8 2023

 Aligning Bounded Contexts with Subdomains in Legacy Code

One way or another, each system contains some kind of boundaries. I would go so far and claim that even the dreaded Big Ball of Mud systems consist of parts that could be perceived as separate though undoubtedly only under deep scrutiny. The difference is in the “thickness” of the boundaries and the measure of interrelationships between the different parts of the system, the frequency and amount of data that is passed across the fences. It is the latter that leads to increased coupling resulting in systems that are hard to maintain and hard to change. This presentation will present a story of an attempt to achieve an alignment between perceived subdomains, logical boundaries and source code structure in a legacy system. Based on the use case from healthcare we will go into technical detail on concrete steps that were followed to create a new bounded context using strategic Domain-Driven Design and 4+1 Architectural View Models.

Architecture DDD Design Video

Dec 22 2022

 Balancing Coupling in Software Design

We are used to treating coupling as the necessary evil. Hence, we aim to break systems apart into the smallest services possible, in the ever-lasting quest of decoupling everything. But what results are we getting by following this reasoning? — Instead of the promised land of evolvable systems, many such “decouple everything” endeavors lead straight into the chains of distributed monoliths. Can we do better? What if there is a better way to handle coupling in distributed systems? Or even, what if instead of fighting coupling, we can use it as a heuristic for designing systems that are actually evolvable and maintainable? That’s exactly what you will learn in this session: what coupling is, and how you can use it as a design tool. We will start by taking a journey through time, and explore the different models of evaluating coupling. Next, we will combine the existing knowledge into a coherent model — a simple function for evaluating a system’s decomposition into components. This function will allow you to assess the expected effort for evolving a system and use it as a heuristic for optimizing architectural design decisions.

DDD Design Video

Dec 22 2022