Who holds the architectural vision? Who implements architectural infrastructure? Should infrastructure development be segregated from application development? Successful projects have employed this approach. Successful projects also have dictatorial architects who hide the architectural vision and solely implement infrastructure. Are these bad approaches if so many projects successfully employ them?
Every developer architecting a little every day is a lofty concept I’ve encountered frequently in texts and been fortunate enough to practice on some teams. It answers some of these questions and presents some sound, democratic alternatives to segregated development and isolated, dictatorial architectural teams.

A Poisonous Distinction.
Beck’s White Book is one prominent text that explains the approach. Evans in Domain Driven Design also explores it, seeing a division of developers and architects as a ‘poisonous distinction’. I’ve been on many projects with this division and witnessed some of ailments it’s poison brings. Lets explore the severity of these ailments by considering Pro’s and Con’s of the division:

Pro’s

1. In a large team, a vertical slice of functionality can often be developed faster using a sub-team of developers.
2. Too many decision makers can often slow a process.

Con’s

1. Those not developing infrastructure are inhibited from exposure to tools and technologies. Their experiences and rate of professional development is constrained. Typically these developers end-up being skilled in proprietary frameworks, even if they are built on open source frameworks.
2. Those fortunate enough to perform architectural development are considered technically superior to other developers. Psychological divisions start to form complementing the usual physical divisions that ensue. Developers outside the group become envious.
3. The architectural group tends not to seek advice from outside it borders. A totalitarian mentality becomes prevalent, attempts at democracy often fail. Legitimate, often more rational alternatives and advice can be ignored in favor of personal preferences.
4. Pain experienced through client use of infrastructural API’s is often not felt until a heavy investment has been made and the cost of change is higher.
5. The bus factor rises. Knowledge is not spread, silos develop and dependencies on individuals grow.

Natural Tendencies Easily Prevail.
As much as management may try to limit the effect of the Con’s when they divide teams and employ a hard-line divide and conquer approach, natural tendencies prevail that instigate the Con’s:

1. Management takes a short-term approach to developing infrastructure and assigns the best available developers to complete the infrastructure in the shortest period of time. This usually flows from infrastructure being mistakenly considered best tackled through a “one-off, upfront task”.
2. Designing and developing infrastructure is perceived a fun job. It’s unfortunate technologists are traditionally viewed as geeks satisfied by the mental challenge of solving technical problems. Consequently developers strive to address technical problems above the problems of the business employing them.
3. Teams are naturally defensive of their collective opinions and decisions. A culture of division will cause these defensive walls to propagate. Cross-team communication can become strained on many levels discouraging important feedback, and making the task of integration that much more difficult.

Clearly, it’s hard to police human nature. Admittedly I’ve been fairly pessimistic, but with good reason. Too often I’ve seen team morale shattered by this seemingly logical division. So, by employing this approach you risk developing a poorer solution in a longer period of time, while creating physical and mental barriers and shattering team morale. All significant inputs to poor staff retention. But you don’t have to venture into this tenuous realm of human emotion – I say clear division, especially in terms of bodies, is not the answer. Sure clear leadership in decision making is necessary, and that is a division, but all developers should have a say in deciding and realizing architecture. I’ll get into the details of alternate approaches shortly. But before I get to these approaches I’d like to explore some problems arising from the natural tendencies of technicians.

Who Decides Infrastructure Features And Requirements?
Without accountability developers naturally tend to solve problems that interest them, not the business that employs them. If they can decide their own requirements, the business risks allowing them to develop unnecessary, unused features - they venture into the land of YAGNI. It is natural for technicians to become engrossed in technical challenges, striving to tackle what they consider interesting requirements or designs, losing sight of the business requirements their infrastructure should be fulfilling. Autonomous infrastructure groups certainly suffer from this aliment. Conscientious technicians should derive their technical requirements from business requirements in collaboration with the application development group. But this is not an easy thing to do and often they do not. A complex, co-ordinated effort is required that is even harder when infrastructure groups service large teams, or worse, many teams. Therefore business’ should never assume infrastructure groups act in their best interests. They should strive for ways to account for the activities of infrastructure groups, policing the legitimacy of their requirements, ensuring they address real business needs. But all this management overhead can be avoided in a unified approach. Without the division infrastructure is automatically more accountable to the business requirements – development will not start unless a business requirement fuels it.

Business Problems Are More Challenging.
I’ll ponder one more natural tendency before presenting alternative approaches. Why aren’t developers more concerned with addressing the needs of the business that employs them? In Brooks’ terms, infrastructure development is mostly focused on developing the accidental as opposed to the essential. Tackling the essence of software, business requirements, adds the most value. Tackling technical problems does less for the longevity of technicians, domains are guaranteed to exist longer than any technology. So why do it? Do you consider it fun? Perhaps more mentally challenging? I say understanding domains and developing expressive models and their conceptual contours must be at least equally challenging. I used to think developing frameworks was the pinnacle of development. They were the ultimate challenge. Thankfully my mindset has shifted to more holistic values – developing business functionality in as short as possible time employing a Model Driven approach that usually relies on infrastructure and application logic being developed in parallel. I find the challenges still abound, the greatest now come in developing an those expressive, deep models and discovering those contours I referred to earlier. The industry is after all increasingly demanding multi-faceted developers, competent in development, analysis and testing. So I say challenge that industry misnomer and strive to solve business problems.

An Alternative.
So, onto that alternative I’ve been mentioning. For those knowledgeable with XP this will be nothing new:

1. Sure technical leadership is important, I’m all for that. I see their primary responsibility as ultimate decision makers. They also communicate the architectural vision and ensure it is upheld. They should not, however, dictate architectures, designs or implementations. They should seek out ideas and input, sure they’ll have plenty themselves but they should be extremely open to others. Just like any other developer, they should also be developers of both infrastructure and application logic. They should not be the sole developers of infrastructure, on a covert operation to design and implement its functionality as they deem fit.
2. As much as possible, developers using infrastructure should also contribute to its development. As they use it they will develop refined ideas on the infrastructures most effective API. They should have the opportunity to feedback these ideas into the infrastructure. Their changes could fuel deeper insights into the infrastructure. Just like normal application development, developers can pair with technical leads or other developers to complete and refine features of infrastructure.
3. When work is about to begin on scheduled infrastructure requirements hold a meeting requesting input from all developers. Flesh-out designs, start discussing API’s, get everyone aware of and thinking about the infrastructure. Make it an open invite – those that don’t wish to attend have at least had the opportunity to attend. Importantly, don’t make concrete decisions about the API yet, and don’t code the complete API in one big-bang. Let the API grow as use demands it - when application functionality demands the use of some aspect of the API only then develop it. This is what I and others term ‘organic development’. It is an excellent means of ensuring development efforts are accountable to business requirements. If infrastructure is being added to an existing application, again let the infrastructure grow organically as new requirements or bugs demand code changes.

Conclusion.
So we still have a division of leadership, but there’s a strong concept of one-team. We’ve engendered buy-in, explored a wider range of solutions, spread the knowledge and flattened the organizational hierarchy somewhat by spreading the decision making abilities of the leadership group (I’ll explore this aspect in my next blog). We’ve also made infrastructure development efforts more accountable to business requirements. All top-notch goodness. So I say fight the division trend, spread infrastructure knowledge, let all contribute to it’s design and development in parallel to application development.

Serial circuitry is simple but very fragile, a failing link causes the entire circuit to fail.

A serial circuit operators life is made that much more difficult by the added maintenance burden this imposes – of having to check each component to ensure the circuit does not fail. Essentially it’s a dumb circuit that requires constant management. An operators time is quickly consumed managing the circuit.
What if the circuit components had added intelligence allowing them to diagnose their condition? The simple circuit model is still in-tact, each component relying on the others, but the operators life is made that much easier.

This theory is no stranger to the automobile industry. For decades they have provided facilities for vehicles to self-diagnose problems in all aspects of vehicles, from engines to tyre pressure.

Why hasn’t this theory been applied to software? How much easier would administrators lives be with self-diagnosing software, applications that can express their condition through a convenient interface? I’ll make some analogies between the software and automobile industries to highlight how we’ve dropped the ball:

• Applications are diagnosed by simply starting the engine and seeing what happens.
• Applications are typically more complex in nature than automobiles. Interestingly though application administrators are usually as ignorant as automobile operators when it comes to inner workings.

This is an intriguing topic. Why haven’t tools surfaced that more easily provide this capability to applications than via custom development? Perhaps software is less prone to failure than vehicles? As intriguing as it is, I digress from the main point of this entry.

The basic theory behind the chain and link analogy is that each link knows itself best. Each is best at informing the other links of its condition and its connecting points (interfaces). It’s classic OO theory – data is held, managed and encapsulated by each link to form the chain.

10 years ago Brooks made reference to this principle in the context of management styles – he titled his section on this topic as The Power of Giving up Power. The theory was that management should delegate as much as possible to its subordinates. He highlighted the net result is increased morale, freedom, creativity, productivity and a greater capability of management to manage the whole operations as it’s less concerned about the inner workings of its parts. Indeed, management has more power in managing the organization as a result. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a very generic, simple theory that applies to life in many ways.

For software project management, I see these subordinates as groups of analysts, developers and testers. Each of these groups knows best how to efficiently integrate with the others. Why not trust in their knowledge? Rely on them to integrate with the other groups in a way which best suites them. Let them tune their practices in-line with the overall methodology in a way that’s best for them. Give others the opportunity to advise and negotiate especially on the touching points with other groups, but never dictate. That is a sure recipe for disaster leading to probable inefficiencies, distrust and disenfranchisement. Management should clear it’s vision of ‘this group should do A, B and C to produce X, Y and Z’. Instead management should be concerned about articulating what needs to be produced and leaving the groups to decide how best to produce it. Let them hopefully reap the benefits Brooks mentioned as a result. This principle should be the guiding principle when formalizing any methodology.

And if you’re inclined to dictate to a link because it is not smart enough to know, then perhaps that link needs an upgrade – they may lack the experience needed to do their job well.

This topic has dwelled in my mind since my ThoughtWorks days.

How does a developer win the trust of colleagues in highly skilled teams? How does one qualify to contribute to the select group that seem to form the conceptual architecture and high-level design? Or even the low-level design?

From my experience, highly skilled working environments, with officially relatively flat organizational hierarchies - still subtly form a hierarchy. To earn respect you have to win respect. Fair enough to some degree, but still the lack of officiality is more likely to lead to emotionally charged decisions.

In XP practicing organizations, according to Beck (in true emergent fashion), every developer should perform a little architecture and design every day. Granted this should never be solo, unless you happen to be on a one man ‘team’. But, what do you do if there is a select, implicit, group governing the design. They may not be control freaks, they just see danger in granting developers too much freedom. Now, in an organization that lives by Becks model, having this implicit design group is a slur on the other developers, albeit intentionally or not. It’s a clear sign of a lack of trust.

I can understand the reasons for such groups being formed - it’s a way of reducing risk. There’s a confidence that the group will make the right decisions. But if you’re outside that group, and you want to be a part of making the decisions (just like Beck preaches), then, depending on how seriously you take your profession, it can hurt. It limits your technical/professional progression. It serves to alienate colleagues. Though the intentions are good in the outer it’s considered badness.

But it’s not all that bad. The days of the Whiteboard Architect aristocracy that Brooks pictured all those years ago are thankfully going the way of the Dodo. Yet I think we’re struggling to reach Becks vision. Perhaps there’s two barriers holding us back:

• A general lack of skill in the industry.
• Those considered highly skilled seem to have superiority complexes.

The pride and confidence of the highly skilled make it especially difficult to break into the upper escelon of the ‘technical heap’. Maybe one day the serfs will subtilely rebel.

Which is the lesser of the two evil barriers? You tell me. From where I stand one is just as evil as the other.