SE Radio 236: Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture

Johannes Thönes talks to Rebecca Parsons, Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks, about evolutionary architecture. The practice of evolutionary software architecture means making decisions as late as possible (last responsible moment) and setting up cross-functional requirements that the architecture has to meet (architectural fitness function).

In the beginning, Parsons and Thönes introduce the term evolutionary architecture and explain the difference to emergent design. Parsons also explains why big design upfront is a bad idea and why we still need architecture even in Agile projects.

Parsons then describes five principles of evolutionary architecture (last responsible moment, architect and develop for evolvability, Postel's law, architect for testability, and Conway's law). She goes on to highlight three techniques of evolutionary architecture (database refactoring, continuous delivery, and microservices).