Cultivating architecture with principles

Many organizations strive to establish independent, autonomous development teams. The goal is to achieve speed, scalability, and empowermentbut you have to decide what architecture governance looks like in a decentralized setup. Birgitta Boeckeler explores architecture principles as a way to avoid chaos, providing lessons about using them to walk the line between hard rules and helpful guidance.

Many organizations today strive to establish autonomous development teams who can move as independently of each other as possible. The goal is to achieve speed, scalability, and empowerment. The bigger you get, the less central decision making will work, because a central group just cannot know enough to make good decisions. You have to decide what architecture governances look like in such a decentralized setup and how to avoid chaos. And you have to know how to walk the line between hard rules and helpful guidance. One way to create a shared understanding of what architecture means in your particular organization is to introduce architecture principles and use them to guide all the teams’ decision making toward common goals. Birgitta Boeckeler explores different ways of creating and phrasing principles, outlines what you need in place around principles to make them practical and effective, and shares some lessons she’s learned from a few organizations where she’s seen principles in action.