Navigating Evolutionary Architecture

“Evolutionary architecture became a necessity, not because anybody wanted it to be, but because you didn’t have a choice. You have to be able to change your systems to keep up with changing business and consumer expectations, let alone regulatory frameworks.”

In this episode, I have an insightful conversation with Rebecca Parsons, coauthor of Building Evolutionary Architectures and ex-CTO of ThoughtWorks, on the topic of evolutionary architecture. Rebecca shares the definition and principles of evolutionary architecture, as well as some important practices that software engineering teams can adopt to support it. Rebecca also offers her perspective on the impact of AI in software development and evolutionary architecture.

Key takeaways:

- Evolutionary architecture supports guided, incremental change across multiple dimensions.

- Fitness functions are a key tool for implementing evolutionary architecture.

- Some of the important engineering practices for evolutionary architecture include continuous delivery, evolutionary database, contract testing, and choreography over orchestration.

- AI coding assistants can help analyze and understand complex legacy systems, aiding in refactoring and modernization efforts.

- Over-reliance on AI coding assistants may hinder the development of proper abstraction and critical thinking skills, especially in junior developers.

Listen out for:

(00:02:35) Career Turning Points

(00:08:38) Why Adopt Evolutionary Architecture

(00:11:06) Evolutionary vs Rewrite

(00:13:41) Architecture Definition

(00:16:45) Evolutionary Architecture Adoption

(00:20:56) Evolutionary Architecture Definition

(00:22:32) Fitness Function

(00:26:07) Commonly Adopted Fitness Functions

(00:29:33) Principles of Evolutionary Architecture

(00:35:24) Conway’s Law & Postel’s Law

(00:39:40) Practices of Evolutionary Architecture

(00:45:41) The Impact of AI to Evolutionary Architecture

(00:48:44) The AI Worries

(00:52:32) 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

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Rebecca Parsons’ Bio
Dr. Rebecca Parsons is currently independent, having been Thoughtworks CTO and CTO Emerita for over 15 years. She has more years of experience than she’d like to admit in technology and large-scale software development. She recently co-authored the book Building Evolutionary Architectures with Neal Ford and Pat Kua.

Before ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida, after completing a Director’s Post Doctoral Fellowship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her interests include parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, domain specific languages, evolutionary architecture, genetic algorithms, and computational science. Rebecca received a BS in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, and both an MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

Follow Rebecca:

LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/dr-rebecca-parsons

X – x.com/rebeccaparsons

📚 Building Evolutionary Architectures – https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-evolutionary-architectures/9781492097532/

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