Disciplined Agile

One of the age-old debates in the software world is whether software architects need to write code.  We suspect that as an industry we’ll never reach consensus on this topic. Here are our thoughts on the subject.

Short Answer:

Hell yes!

Detailed Answer:

In the following table we list the advantages, disadvantages, and considerations (when does the strategy makes sense) to compare whether a software architect should write code or not.  You may recognize this approach from our book Disciplined Agile Delivery.

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit we’ve made it very clear that we expect Architecture Owners to be actively involved with the development of the solution.  On Disciplined Agile teams the Architecture Owner is effectively a team member with additional responsibilities around leading the team through architecture decisions, in coaching them on architecture skills, and in working closely with your Enterprise Architecture team (if any) to ensure their development team understands and is working towards your organization’s technical roadmap.

We’re often told that it isn’t realistic to expect architects to write code.  Invariably this is coming from people who are currently working in traditional IT organizations that have very well-defined roles, IT organizations that more often than not are struggling to be effective.  Our response is always the same – Really?  Are development teams following your architectural strategy?  Are they eager to work with you, or are they forced to work with you?  This generally leads to a discussion that reveals that things aren’t going so well for these architects in practice, and sometimes leads to a positive discussion as to how we can move towards a more effective approach for them.  They kind of approach described in the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit.

Additional Reading:

• In the mid-1990s James Coplien captured the organizational pattern Architect Also Implements.
• The Architects Don’t Code anti-pattern on Ward Cunningham’s C2 wiki is also a valuable read.

The Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit suggests a robust set of roles for agile solution delivery.  These roles are overviewed in the following figure:

For a detailed description of these roles, please visit the page Roles on DAD Teams.

As you can see from the above diagram, the primary roles of Disciplined Agile (DA) teams are similar to those of Scrum.  In Scrum, the product owner decides what will be built and in what order.  In DA we recognize that architecture is a key source of project risk and someone needs to be responsible for ensuring the team mitigates this risk.  As a result, DA explicitly includes Agile Modeling’s role of architecture owner. The architecture owner is the person who owns the architecture decisions for the team and who facilitates the creation and evolution of the overall solution design.  The person in the role of team lead will often also be in the role of architecture owner, assuming they have the skills and capacity to fill both.  This isn’t always the case, particularly at scale, but it is very common for smaller agile teams.

The responsibilities of the architecture owner include:

• Guiding the creation and evolution of the architecture of the solution that the team is working on.  Note that the architecture owner is not solely responsible for the architecture, but that they lead the technical discussions.
• Mentoring and coaching other team members in architecture practices and issues.
• Working closely with the Enterprise Architecture team, and often being a member of it, to understand and evolve the architectural direction and standards of your organization.
• Ensuring that the team adheres to the architectural direction and standards of your organization.
• Understanding existing enterprise assets such as frameworks, patterns, subsystems and ensuring that the team uses them where appropriate.
• Ensuring that the solution will be easy to support by encouraging good design and refactoring to minimize technical debt.
• Ensuring that the solution is integrated and tested on a regular basis, ideally via the practice of continuous integration(CI).
• Having the final say regarding technical decisions, but they try to avoid dictating the architectural direction in favor of a collaborative, team-based approach. The architecture owner should work very closely with the team lead to identify and determine strategies to mitigate key project technical risks.
• Leads the initial architecture envisioning effort at the beginning of the project and supports the initial requirements envisioning effort (particularly when it comes to understanding and evolving the non-functional requirements for the solution).

One of the key reasons for having this role in DA is that the architecture owner, like the product owner, has a say in work items that are added and prioritized in the work item list (backlog in Scrum parlance).  While business value is certainly a prime determinant of priorities, completing work related to mitigating technical risks is also important.  Additionally, in DA the aim is to deliver consumable solutions, not just working software.  As such, sometimes it is necessary to add work items that are technical in nature, for example related to error logging/monitoring.  Or perhaps work items need to be added to improve the continuous integration and deployment processes.

We have found that the concept of having both product and architecture owners ensures that the solution addresses both functional and quality requirements such as usability and supportability adequately.  In fact, on my current project, I worked with the product and architecture owners to negotiate their priorities such that the iteration underway includes not only a selection of high priority stories, but also a set of technical work items related to hardening the solution in preparation for entering the Transition phase of delivering the solution to the stakeholders.  Without a specific role of architecture owner, it can be difficult to escalate important technical work into the work item list.  As a result it is often done subversively without the knowledge of the product owner which is not a healthy practice, or worse it never gets done resulting in a poor quality solution.

Scott has written a good article that describes the architecture owner role in more depth.  You can view it here.