This content emphasizes the critical importance of software architecture documentation for project success, advocating for a "just enough" upfront design to ensure clarity, alignment, and efficient development across teams.
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How often did you find yourself in the
annoying situation of steering the wheel
towards a completely different direction
for delivering a new feature due to lack
of clarity of what to express inside
your code? Fear not because this video
is going to provide you the answers to
all those questions. I want to share
with you stories from the trenches,
techniques and mechanism for finally
cracking the code and getting enough
documentation to succeed in your
software project. Are you ready? Let's
dive in. [Music]
[Music]
Hi everyone, my name is Luca. I'm an
architect super passionate about
software architecture and the
intricacies of its social technical
aspect. I spent over 20 years of my
career working from embedded or low-end
devices to global distributed system in
the cloud and now I'm principal
serverless specialist in AWS. Where are
we? Oh yes, documentation. Documentation
plays a critical role in the software
development process especially in
distributed system such as
microservices, microrends, data mesh,
documenting software architectures helps
to align teams, scale businesses and
empower developers. Many people think
architecture is just a technical topic.
It's definitely not just a technical
topic. Keep in mind that a lean mindset
is essential here. We need to have
enough design up front to start our
development process and we should
maintain our diagrams to democratize the
evolution of a system across every
function of your tech department. Too
often I have experienced teams not fully
understanding what they have to build.
rushing to create the proof of concept
that nail down the complexity of a
technical part only halfway through the
process realizing that they forgot a key
detail that now requires a greater
effort than designing the project with
that in mind up front. It's time to
change our habits and dedicate enough
time in designing up front enough
architecture that will allow us to move
forward our projects. I don't want to
overwhelm you with thousands of
techniques but just the ones I have seen
more successfully applied in many
organization that have brought benefits
in the development of software across
multiple teams. During this video I'm
going to introduce you to several
techniques architectural decision
records request for comments eventtor
storming and the C4 model. At the end of
this video, you will have a solid
understanding of each method and be well
equipped to start changing the way you
model and deliver software. Why
documentation matters? Software modeling
at the beginning of the project is a
fundamental step that too often is
ignored or teams don't dedicate enough
time to this practice. This will
accelerate drastically the development
process because everyone has clarity of
intentions. That doesn't mean we have to
nail down every single detail up front,
but have a just enough architecture to
start the process. The focus before
coding should be nailing down the
architecture characteristics and
business characteristics. This share
understanding provides several benefits.
streaming line decision making,
simplifying on boarding for a new team,
facilitating collaboration between cross
functional teams, reducing potential
misunderstanding, ensuring consistent
knowledge transfer. Now there is no
denying the value of well-curated
structure and updated software
documentation. It's a mustave nowadays
and we cannot forgotten. When everyone
inside the team understands the
architecture, they are aligned in their
vision and objectives. This alignment is
what allows team to move along the same
path regardless of their unique roles
and responsibilities. Essentially, we
are talking about creating an unified
perspective that helps all the
stakeholders including developers,
project managers, QA and even clients
maintaining consistent view of the
architecture. This alignment results in
more streamline decision-making,
lowering the chances of costly missteps
caused by miscommunication or
misunderstandings. Alongside
facilitating alignment, software
documentation promotes the profound
concept of a synchronous growth. Imagine
your company decide to scale, attracting
new hiring or exploring new verticals.
When new members join the team, how
would you bring them up to speed with
the software architecture? This is where
documentation comes in. Instead of
relying of individual knowledge transfer
which can be inconsistent and time
consuming, well doumented software
architecture can provide an onboarding
mechanism that is available 247.
Furthermore, documentation is not just
an invaluable resource for the present
but also an investment for the future.
As the software evolves, the
documentation stands as chronicle of the
project's journey, helping future teams
understand why certain architectural
decision were taken. In summary, if you
want to streamline your internal
processes, scale effectively and create
a robust foundation for both the present
and future growth of your organization,
you absolutely need to prioritize
software architecture documentation.
Before we start, I want to spend a few
words on another initiative that I
started a few years ago. It's a
newsletter. It's called Dear Architects.
It's a free newsletter where I collect
weekly the articles I found most
interesting and that can spark new ideas
for you and your teams. Every newsletter
comes with five distinct resources on
software architecture. The content is a
collection of great resources found on
the web that lands in your inbox every
week. I cover topics like generative AI,
distributed system, design patterns,
observability, migration and
modernization journeys, case studies
shared by well-known brands in the
industry and way more. If you are
interested to know more, click the link
in the description and register now. No
advertising, completely free. Join the
community composed by tens of thousands
of members already. We'll now dive into
the details of var documentation
techniques. Let's start with the ADR or
architectural decision record is an
effective approach to documenting
architectural decisions made during the
software development process. It was
first proposed by Michael Negard to
maintain an organized timeline of
decisions providing context around the
problems addressed the solution adopted
and the reasons behind those choices. An
invaluable aspect of ADRs lies in how
they facilitate informed decision making
in the future. By summarizing choices in
an accessible format, ADRs serve as a
guideposts around past decisions. This
understanding minimizes duplication and
fosters consistency as developer can
refer back to this decision when facing
similar conundrums. Very often I've
experienced new joiners that were asking
why a certain decision was made and
thanks to ADR I was able to immediately
provide context and clear understandings
and insights why certain things were
happening. ADR also improved project
continuity as they offer a detailed
understanding of why specific decisions
were made. This is crucial especially in
large projects or organization where
team members might change over time or
are spread across the world. Having
articulated reasoning and clear
documentation ensures smoother
transitions and continual progress even
with new team members on board. ADRs are
comprehensive. Beyond just recording the
outcome of a decision, ADRs detail the
context in which a decision was made and
context in architecture is everything.
It also collects alternatives considered
during the process and potential
consequences anticipated. This holistic
view helps developers to understand not
just the what, but also the why, how,
and when of decisions. Fostering a more
profound understanding of the project's
development path. By openly documenting
and sharing decision records, it ensures
that all stakeholders are on the same
page. This transparency bolsters trust,
facilitates collaboration, and leads to
more cohesive development efforts. In
conclusion, ADRs serve as a powerful
tool for improving project management
and decision making in software
development. I use ADRs many times in my
project even with customers. I also ask
multiple teams to write down important
decisions on ADR. Bear in mind that you
don't have to create an ADR for every
single decision you make. But the
important one that impacts the direction
of travel of a tech department is a
mandatory for me. For example, imagine
you are embarking a modernization
journey and you have to define at the
beginning the guard race for the whole
organization. Things like version
control strategy, observability,
communication between microservices,
security, a specific pattern that you
want to integrate with the third party
system and so on. These are great
candidates for an architecture decision
record. There are several templates
available to define an ADR. I provide a
link in the description below. So bear
in mind there isn't just a single
approach. Find the one that fits you
better. Next up is the request for
comments or RFC. A comprehensive and
effective communication process used to
capture feedback suggestions or
standardization around a particular
technology system or protocol. The RFC
process served to improve the
understanding and applicability of a
concept through a widely accessible
mechanism. It enable experts, developers
and every other stakeholder for a
project to contribute with their
insights. This in turn enhances the
overall quality of a particular proposal
or standard. This collaborative approach
allows for crucial refinements and
optimization which would have been
challenging to achieve solely by the
initial author. Additionally, RFC's help
to promote discussion and consensus
building within the community, fostering
a shared understanding around the
subject matter. The open nature of the
RFC process not only encourages fresh
perspective and innovative ideas, but
also provides valuable feedback for the
author. By embracing constructive
criticism, potential issues and
alternative ideas, RFC's can evolve into
a more robust and comprehensive
standards and protocols. In fact, in
many open source projects, you can
propose new features via RFC's.
Moreover, as RFC's progress through
discussion, reviews, and revision, they
serve as a reliable source of
documentation and learning. They
document the rationale behind proposed
solution, keeping an historical record
of the development process and the
decision made along the way. This
information can be particularly useful
for new team members or other
professionals looking to gain insight in
specific technologies or standards. A
great advantage of RFC is that they
enables an asynchronous communication
where everyone can join the
conversation. Everyone is different.
There are introverts, extroverts, there
is maybe a wrong day for a person and
not everyone performs great during a
meeting. RFC's as an asynchronous
mechanism to collect ideas and feedback
bypass all these challenges because
usually it's time boxed and allows
everyone to express their thoughts. I've
seen teams using RFC even to discuss API
evolution so all the consumers of an API
can share their requirements and propose
new ideas. Most of the time RFC's are
storing the version of control system
GitHub, GitLab and similar. So everyone
in tech department has access and can
contribute. In summary, the request for
comments process enriches the
understanding of technology systems and
protocols by engaging a wide array of
experts feedback and fostering a
collaborative approach to problem
solving. As these perspectives merge and
evolve, RFC became a powerful repository
of knowledge. Also in this case, I left
a link to RFC template in the
description below. Now let's move to
another technique called eventtorming.
It's a powerful workshop technique
developed by Alberto Brandolini aims to
enhance the understanding design and
modeling of business domains by focusing
on domain events which represents
significant changes in the domain.
Eventtorming serves as a visual and
collaborative exploration that invites
various stakeholders to work together in
creating a common understanding of the
business process. I've joined several
events session in the past and I can
tell you that is unvaluable what you can
get out of that. One of the core
strengths of eventstorming is that it
fosters a unified understanding by
bringing together every participant from
business experts to developers. Eventing
goes further by promoting a naturally
collaborative dynamic where every
participant's viewpoint is acknowledged
and incorporated. In essence, the
process creates an environment where the
intersection of ideas between different
minds, technical and non-technical,
crafts a share understanding of
realities. This is the perfect way to
align the business requirements with the
technical implementation. Very often I
have seen people that forget that what
we are coding is not just code is
generating value for your customers, for
the people that are using your software.
This is a fundamental catch. What goes
in production is the understanding or
misunderstanding of developers as well
said by Brandolini. Having product
people in the same room of developers
removes the barriers of just thinking to
the technical side and we can start to
focus more on the business outcomes and
focusing on your customers. That's the
key learning of this approach. This
methodology works perfectly with domain
driven design or DDD as specifying key
domain events can lead identifying DDD
constructs such as aggregates or bounded
context. These insights become pivotal
when designing and implementing
efficient software. It starts with a
broad exploration of code the big
picture followed by more detailed
exploration supporting a flexible and
agile adoption of the insight extracted
from the process. Finally, eventtorming
is a potent learning tool and a fast
user-friendly way to model a domain. Be
it a new project or an existing
architecture requiring improvements,
eventorming enables better clarity with
effectiveness. Very often during an
eventtorming session, developers add the
opportunity to tweak a feature and make
it easier to implement, reducing the
friction with the product team and
creating a synergy within the extended
team instead of creating silos between
departments. I used eventtorming for on
boarding new developers in a team for
clarifying how to evolve a specific
domain and even to model complex
features that touch multiple domains if
not the entire system. Often people
think it might be a waste of time. After
trying one or two days of even storming
session, I got customers telling me that
these techniques did in two days what
they were used to do in five months.
Don't underestimate this approach
because it's a musth have in particular
parts of the software for making sure
that what is built is what the business
expects and is delivered with clear
objectives in mind and possibly on time.
In the video description, I've added
also a link about eventtorrming if you
want to deep dive into the topic. Last
but not least, the C4 model created by
software architect Simon Brown is a
powerful approach to visualizing and
documenting a systems architecture. It
stands for context, container,
component, and code and presents a
multi-layered view of software
architecture making it more accessible
of different stakeholders depending on
their requirements. The simplicity of
the C4 model makes it easy to understand
and apply, bringing a wealth of benefits
to the software development process. One
key advantage of the C4 model is its
layer structure, allowing for a diverse
understanding according to stakeholders
needs. For instance, non-technical
stakeholders might find the context
layer enough for understanding what
they're looking for. Furthermore, this
model encourages to use of common
language annotation, reducing
misinterpretation and fostering a shared
understanding among team members. It
enables effective knowledge transfer
across the team, making it easier for
new members to understand the software
architecture from different point of
view. By visualizing complex systems,
the C4 model supports architectural
design decisions. It highlights
potential issues, dependencies, or areas
of improvements that might not have been
as apparent in the code alone, leading
to well-informed decisions. In
conclusion, the C4 model simplifies
understanding of complex software
systems by breaking them down into more
manageable communicable components. In
my experience, I've seen just one
challenge with this model. The fourth C
code refers to the code diagram that
tends to get out of date very quickly.
So watch out and make sure your drying
arms are up to date. Obviously this one
is one of the many approaches but I
believe it's one of the most pragmatic.
As you have seen I didn't provide you
with just one technique but several of
them. You will discover how much impact
good documentation has during the
software development life cycle. And
when it happens I encourage you to write
down your experience in the comments
below. Investing time in software
modeling is not a waste of time. Thanks
to that you are going to have a
comprehensive understanding of what you
need to codify of translate into code
and you will be able to reach your goal
faster. So happy documenting and see you
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