Architecture Does Not Emerge - a Conversation with Tracy Bannon

Good before going to bed on Friday evening :)

Some things I have noted:

Until this day, I say I’ve done three things: insert levels of indirection, trade off space and time, and three, try to get my clients to tell me what they really want.

If you’re doing something with ERP systems, well, first of all, I apologize and feel bad for you in life, but that’s a whole other conversation.

Let’s think somebody ultimately is paying for this thing to be built. Somebody somewhere has a vision on what they want it to be. There are humans who will eventually be using it. It needs to meet those business or mission needs. It has to start with that.

what bothers me is when people make implicit assumptions and don’t make them explicit.

“The decisions that you make upfront are the ones that,” and this is paraphrasing, “the ones that are too expensive and you cannot change later.”

But I’m talking about when you make a decision, write it down, make an architectural decision record. It can be itty bitty, itty bitty. But just Tracy made this decision today. Context, we don’t have a license for that and it’s going to take eight months to get the new license or acquisition or whatever else.

The other thing that struck me about your example about the people doing the two front ends, and I’m going to use this to loop back into the conversation about developers and architects, is that they don’t understand, or appear not to understand, that in the global perspective, by picking two different UI designs, you’ve made the programmer hiring decision harder.

I’ve had a lot of contentious conversations with folks who say, “I’m a solution architect.” Well, what technologies do you dabble with? Well, I haven’t touched code in about 20 years.

It’s, if you’re going to be an architect and have that mindset, you need to be able to go from the boiler room to the boardroom. You need to be able to communicate, but it also means that in order to be trusted, you have to bring your chops to the table.

I think lack of taxonomy is probably one of the killers in any organization. You and I don’t agree on what that word means. And with that comes so much nuance and with that comes muscle memory and process issues. That’s something that just drives me crazy on a daily basis.

So I am a real junkie when it comes to people talking about how processes don’t work. Well, let’s have an hour conversation. Let’s map out how it’s actually working. I’m not talking about Lean Six Sigma values. I’m talking about, let’s find the waste.

One of the things that I would have people to take away is the need to constantly be considering how you can decouple or loosely couple things, because that aids in the longevity. If you think about even electronics and things that you bought in your house, the big integrated front of your dishwasher, I now have to replace the entire dishwasher.

Because back in my day, full stack meant you are actually worth your salt.

My way is not always the right way. Don’t let anybody hear that, but it’s true.