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Agile Requirements Book: First Chapter on Architecture
Posted on February 19, 2010 by Dean Leffingwell in Agile Architecture, Agile Requirements, Scaled Agile Framework/Big PictureThe Agile Requirements book chapter originally entitled “Epics and Enterprise Architecture” has been mostly written but has been split into two chapters. Chapter 19, now titled Agile Enterprise Architecture is now available in draft form and has been pushed to the book resource page. The second chapter on architecture, Achieving Architectural Flow, will likely follow in a month or so.
Comments are of course, welcome, and I’d be particularly interested if anyone has input or opinions on some of the newest content, particularly the later sections on Implementing and Splitting Architectural Epics.
I only wanted to comment on 3 methods of implementing architecture epics, especially – 3rd one. It is even more than just a method but rather an engineering expertise that the team should develop in order to succeed with it. Especially because it requires equal attention from all perspectives (all three of them: design, build and test) for both “current value” and “deferred value” – all under the pressure of “today”. I remember this a couple of times on my previous-previous project we had to do this similar thing – the team develops a feature and then at some point: boom! – and it’s been deferred by product mgmt team for so to speak market driven reasons. …But we had to preserve this functionality intact (and hidden) until time.
So my point is simple: code gets soar fast and as you make decision to sustain something even though it’s hidden from the user sight until time, you MUST grant it every honor you would do to “current value”: unit tests, automated functional tests, configurations etc etc – all of this needs to be sustained for as long as you wish to sustain the ability to “reanimate” the code without a trouble. Moreover, my experience is that features “deferred” are most often experimental complex and error prone ones, that’s why keeping entire house clean (especially sealed chambers) makes perfect sense until time tenants arrive.