Architectural activities, in simple terms, are actions taken around an architectural goal. An architecture activity may involve hundreds or even thousands of people. In such a large-scale personnel collaboration, architects need to find their own position in it: clarify what they should do and what other participants should do.
Changes in the times have led to changes in the way research and development are done. In the Internet age, agile development has become the mainstream of the development model. However, while the agile behavior helps the business to iterate at a high speed, it also leads to a large number of short-term behaviors, which is the so-called technical debt. These technical debts constitute the main technical challenges faced by architectural activities. Specifically, there are five types as follows.
1. Reflective R&D behavior
Whether it is a start-up company or a start-up team in a large enterprise, it is often faced with tremendous delivery pressure, which leads to a behavior I call "reflexive development": writing code is like a knee-jerk reflex. The daily work of R&D personnel is a cycle between receiving requirements, writing code, going online, and repairing faults. They have little time to think and pursue long-term designs.
Although this short-term behavior does not affect business iterations, if it occurs frequently in a large-scale architectural activity, the consequences will be disastrous.
2. Large-scale activities
The distributed R&D model often adopts the microservice architecture. One advantage of the microservice architecture is that changes can be made independently between services, and there is little need for collaboration between teams while keeping the API stable. Therefore, the maintainers of each service can independently decide their own release process and delivery rhythm.
In the Internet age, in order to maximize the spread of traffic, we often aggregate and amplify marketing effects through a large-scale commercial event, such as the 618 promotion, Double Eleven promotion, Spring Festival red envelopes, new product online launches, etc. Then the relatively independent research and development model of microservices poses a huge challenge to the development of a unified process and delivery rhythm across teams.
3. Distributed R&D Center
Internet companies often have multiple R&D centers distributed around the world. Under this cross-country, cross-region, and cross-language R&D model, there may be a lot of communication within each R&D center, but the communication between each R&D center is relatively isolated from each other. Over time, Conway's Law kicks in: "The structure of the system is isomorphic to the communication structure of the organization that produced those designs". In other words, when we cannot change the communication structure of an organization, the design produced by the architecture activity will have great limitations.
4. Pervasive cognitive differences
Each team, or even each R&D team, usually develops code intensively in its own isolated environment, so everyone generally does not have a unified language and overall understanding. This situation also exists in business and product teams. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to reach a macroscopic, complete, feasible and generally recognized plan.
5. Challenges faced by large-scale architecture activities
In scenarios with high risk and high return expectations, it is necessary to ensure high certainty of project completion and high fidelity to goals.
Under these challenges, the role of architects is actually very obvious. We need to help teams resist reflective R&D behaviors, independent decision-making R&D models, decentralized R&D teams, common communication barriers and cognitive differences, as well as high-risk, high-work-intensive and high-complexity scenarios, and ultimately guarantee architectural activities Accomplish goals with high certainty.
This article is a study note for Day30 in April. The content comes from "Guo Dongbai's Architecture Course" in Geek Time . This course is recommended.