Architecture is an unavoidable element of any tech-enabled organization. As Grady Booch says: “every software-intensive system has an architecture. In some cases that architecture is intentional, while in others it is accidental. Most of the times it is both”. Furthermore, organizations are complex sociotechnical systems: teams (“Who) that listen and respond to "What" their environment and customers needs, by building tech-enabled products (“How”)). These elements are continuously changing, which means that we need to evolve and adapt the way we approach architecture in our teams and across the organization. This is particularly important in modern product organizations that want to support a sustainable “fast flow of change” to continuously respond to their customers and environment.
In this talk, I motivate the need to embrace this evolutionary approach to architecture, i.e.: continuously evolve its “architecture topology” (https://esilva.net/tla_insights/architecture-topologies). To provide a robust formulation I describe the organization as a network of related scopes (e.g.: Teams, Products, Product Groups, Portfolios, etc.). These scopes are used to scale the organization and its ability to sustainably evolve. Architecture happens in all these scopes and across them.
During the talk, I explore multiple architecture topologies and elements that evolve and mature them, for example: how to position architects and/or people doing architecture; how it enables decision making, how it supports learning & flow of change, etc. I also discuss challenges normally found in each architecture topology (which tend to be the bottlenecks that we must address by evolving to another topology). Then, I share strategies that we can use to evolve the architecture topology, for example, team topologies, developing a culture of trust, architecture as enabling team, coaching & support architects transitioning, advice process, etc. For each of the architecture topologies, I also share first-hand real-world examples, in particular ones I have seen over the last five years working as Principal Tech Lead at bol.com (an organization that went through hyper-growth and required several evolutions of its architecture topology).
My main goal with this talk is to emphasize that different organizations will need to evolve and adapt their architecture topologies to support their objectives. I also want to highlight some trends in reframing the positioning of architecture (and architects) in modern organizations: from a “controlling” perspective to an “enabling” one, focused on maximizing information exchange, and enablement of teams' ownership of decision-making.
