Summary of Building Evolutionary Architectures
For a variety of reasons, parts of software systems resist change, becoming more brittle and intractable over time. However, the world we inhabit has exactly the opposite characteristic: the software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium. New tools, techniques, approaches, and frameworks constantly impact the equilibrium in unanticipatable ways. While this creates a headache for brittle systems, it also provides the ultimate solution. Over the last few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This book ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.
Along the way, we also answer the questions How is long term planning possible when everything changes all the time? and Once I’ve built an architecture, how can I prevent it from gradually degrading over time?.
An evolutionary architecture supports building systems that allow architects and developers to make sweeping changes to the most important parts of their systems with confidence. It covers practices that allow developers to build continual architectures, which evolve cleanly without the need for a crystal ball.
Our Definition:
An evolutionary architecture supports guided, incremental change across multiple dimensions.
Incremental change
Incremental change relies on continuous delivery practices like deployment pipelines, mature DevOps, good testing culture, and other current agile engineering best practices. When combined with a granular, modular architecture, incremental change allows developers to make small modifications at the architectural level without breaking unrelated pieces. Incremental change is the machinery that enables evolutionary architectures to evolve.
Fitness Functions
Evolutionary architecture allows different parts of the system to evolve in the ways most sensible to solve a problem. However, we don’t want the system to evolve in a way that harms some architectural concern. For example, improving performance with caching might accidentally harm security in the process. How can we build guidelines within the architecture to support change but guard specific attributes? Evolutionary computing defines a fitness function as an objectively quantifiable function used to summarise how close a given design solution is to achieving the set aims. When defining an evolutionary algorithm, the designer seeks a “better” algorithm; the fitness function defines what “better” means in this context.
We borrow this concept to define architectural fitness functions:
An architectural fitness function provides an objective integrity assessment of some architectural characteristic(s).
Fitness functions encompass existing engineering practices such as testing and metrics, but also advanced capabilities such as Netflix’s Chaos Monkey A wide variety of dimensions exist for architectural fitness functions: context, cadence, scope, and so on. We identify a variety of important fitness function dimensions and how they interact, along with techniques for discovering them.
Multiple dimensions
Architects commonly focus on a narrow dimension of a software project, the technical architecture: frameworks, dependencies, integration architecture, and so on. But real software projects contain numerous orthogonal concerns: data architecture, security, scalability, testability, and a host of others. Modern architectures that support evolution must accommodate all these important dimensions of architecture–continuously.
The complete scope of architecture includes the requirements, the architectural concerns deemed critical to success by architects, and all the other parts that impact software development (data, security, operations, and so on). The combination of all these things forms the dimensions of the architecture.
Evolutionary Architecture
We offer a new perspective on evolving architecture, making “evolvability” a first-class “-ility” in software projects. We provide a logical framework for identifying and protecting parts of the architecture that evolve: identify the important dimensions, define fitness functions to ensure compliance, and use incremental change engineer practices such as deployment pipelines and other continuous delivery practices to automatically verify fitness.
The concepts of evolutionary architecture also help automate previously underserved constituents (“non-functional requirements”) by providing a framework for identifying important dimensions, with their critical characteristics, and the mechanism (via fitness functions) for verifying the veracity of those attributes continually. This in turn allows architects to build systems that support ongoing change with confidence that important qualities won’t degrade. Identification of architecture dimension and fitness function occurs at both project inception and as an ongoing concern, building continual architecture.
Table of Contents
- Software Architecture
- Fitness Functions
- Engineering Incremental Change
- Architectural Coupling
- Evolutionary Data
- Building Evolvable Architectures
- Evolutionary Architecture Pitfalls and Antipatterns
- Putting Evolutionary Architecture into Practice