Episode 91: Coding The Architecture with Simon Brown

Craig and Tony talk to Simon Brown at the YOW! 2014 conference in Brisbane. SImon is the author of “Software Architecture for Developers”, creator of the C4 software architecture model and Structurizr. We tracked him down after his talk to talk about:

YOW! 2014 talk “Agility and the Essence of Software Architecture“
Create a software guidebook as opposed to big upfront documentation
Tony is an old BA apparently… Explains a lot 🙂
If you can’t sketch out your architecture, you don’t understand it
C4 model was created after observations many archtecture drawings don’t make sense
Tony shows his age again by referencing Mr. Squiggle (video)
A tiny percentage of architects understand UML – do you teach them UML or teach them something simple?
Structurizr replaces drawing boxes in Visio or OmniGraffle, creates the C4 model from Java code and keeps it up to date, other implementations for C# have also been created
Suggest updating the diagrams at the end of every storycard
C4 starts at system context level, opens up to containers, zooms down to components inside containers and then down to the class level
Use the model to understand your microservices strategy versus monoliths (article by Rob Annett)
C4 is a drill down per system, does not have much to offer enterprise architects – can add an extra enterprise architecture layer if you wish
ArchiMate allows Enterprise Architects to model processes
We need Enterprise Architects but architects need to be involved in the day to day architecture including code (REA have a delivery engineering team that they spoke about at YOW!)
Roy Osherove’s Elastic Leadership – starting point is one architect but then get more people involved
Ask your team what an Architect does and you will probably get conflicting answers, it is a not well defined role
System Architect and Tech Lead are essentially the same thing