Kurt Bittner

1 month ago | infoq.com | Pierre Pureur |Kurt Bittner |Thomas Betts

Selling yourself and your stakeholders on doing architectural experiments is hard, despite the significant benefits of this approach; you like to think that your decisions are good but when it comes to architecture, you don’t know what you don’t know. Stakeholders don’t like to spend money on things they see as superfluous, and they usually see running experiments as simply "playing around".

Nov 13, 2024 | infoq.com | Pierre Pureur |Kurt Bittner |Thomas Betts

Technology Radars are a popular way of characterizing the risk of technology adoption. Technology Radars can help teams form experiments about the solution they are building as well as its architecture. Every product release is, or should be, an experiment about both the value that the team is delivering as well as the sustainability of their solution. These experiments must balance both business and technical risks in a way that business stakeholders can understand and support.

Sep 10, 2024 | infoq.com | Pierre Pureur |Kurt Bittner |Thomas Betts

Incurring Technical Debt (TD) is a way to learn things, and to avoid over-investing in solutions to problems you may not yet fully understand. The idea that releases have to be perfect gets in the way of running experiments. TD reduces the cost of learning and the time it takes to get feedback. TD represents a deviation of your implemented solution from your ideal solution, but that ideal may not turn out to be correct. In other words, what you think is TD may not actually be TD.

Aug 5, 2024 | infoq.com | Pierre Pureur |Kurt Bittner |Thomas Betts

Architectural Retrospectives differ from Architectural Reviews by focusing not on evaluating and improving the architecture itself, but on examining and improving how the team went about creating the architecture. Software architecture is defined by the decisions the development team makes about architecturally significant issues. Architectural Retrospectives focus specifically on how the team made these decisions and looking for ways to improve the way it makes decisions.

Jun 4, 2024 | infoq.com | Pierre Pureur |Kurt Bittner |Thomas Betts

To architect is to be a frustrated perfectionist; a good architecture minimizes this unhappiness by making trade-offs that can be lived with. The main skill in architecting is making trade-offs. These trade-offs reflect the most important and difficult decisions a team will make about its architecture; The impact of architectural trade-off decisions can only be evaluated by building something and testing it, usually in the real world.