Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World

by Pierre Pureur

"Continuous Architecture" provides a broad architectural perspective for continuous delivery, and describes a new architectural approach that supports and enables it. As the pace of innovation and software releases increases, IT departments are tasked to deliver value quickly and inexpensively to their business partners. With a focus on getting software into end-users hands faster, the ultimate goal of daily software updates is in sight to allow teams to ensure that they can release every change to the system simply and efficiently. This book presents an architectural approach to support modern application delivery methods and provide a broader architectural perspective, taking architectural concerns into account when deploying agile or continuous delivery approaches. The authors explain how to solve the challenges of implementing continuous delivery at the project and enterprise level, and the impact on IT processes including application testing, software deployment and software architecture.
Covering the application of enterprise and software architecture concepts to the Agile and Continuous Delivery models Explains how to create an architecture that can evolve with applicationsIncorporates techniques including refactoring, architectural analysis, testing, and feedback-driven developmentProvides insight into incorporating modern software development when structuring teams and organizations"

Genres: Architecture, Technology, Nonfiction, Technical, Business, Software

7258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 2015

Reviews

[Aelena · Rating 4 out of 5]

there is quite a lot of good content and actionable too in this volume in order to bring architecture closer to what constitutes the rhythm of IT and software engineering in a fast paced CI / CD environment today. The book is centered around 6 common-sense principles (too lazy to type them here) in order to bring the architecture discipline (mostly centered here around the enterprise and solution architectures) back from that perceived "ivory tower" abode into the modern agile world. It contains too an interesting chapter about the role of architect, which I liked especially as it validated me in some areas but was also helpful in identifying other weaker spots I need to work on :-)
All in all, sure I will refer back to this book from time to time for reference on specific topics, good articulation of ideas one can use in meetings and specific guidance on certain work tasks.

[Tilman Moser · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept of "Continuous Architecture" as expressed by Erder and Pureur is not a framework or methodology, but a set of six principles and a comprehensive toolbox of good architecture practices, which are presented in a well structured and logical format. Thus the book can be read well from cover to cover as well as being used as a reference study for specific day to day problems.

After a brief introduction of the six principles, the book covers out of the view of (enterprise) architects the topics Requirement Management, Architecture Evolution, Continuous Delivery, and Architecture Validation. For each topic the authors deliver a brief explanation of the problem domain, as well as a proposed solution in the context of their Continuous Architecture concept, which is finally probed against the six principles. Followed by a fictional case study, a deeper pseudo-psychological view on the role of the Continuous Architect, Continuous Architecture in the Enterprise and Enterprise Services.

All in all the book offers a quite useful set of tools and practices without being dogmatic on their usage. Up to this point it could have been a 4-stars-rating... if they wouldn't have put the word "agile" into the subtitle of the book. This raised expectations on my side, which they didn't fulfill.

One would think, that a book about "sustainable architecture in an agile [...] world" would evolve on the concepts of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, or at least challenge its views and concepts against it. But far from it, the only mention of the Manifesto is the statement, that the authors don't believe that the eleventh principle behind the Manifesto ("The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.") is applicable to the enterprise architecture world, but leads to unmanageable and wasteful amounts of refactoring.

It's also worth mentioning, that whenever the authors refer to "Agile", they really refer to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which is in my humble opinion a rather limited view on agility.

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 3 out of 5]

All in all this book is a really solid one about the overall idea of improving architecture in a continuous way - which matches the modern and agile software approach.

I can't exactly say, why the authors introduce their own model and even less why they try to map architect traits to psychological models though.