SATURN 2019

When we talk about design leadership, we mean it in both senses: distinctive design leadership in the market and leading design in the organization. In this tutorial, we explore what that means, how we develop design excellence and leadership in ourselves, and how we nurture it in our teams. We combine an introduction to key topics (with some exposure to related concepts, research, and theory) with some practice elements. We survey essential topics in system design and what it takes to be effective, and then delve into effectiveness areas, including strategic context understanding and shaping, organizational skills such as communication and influence, and how to be a more effective technical leader.

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A blockchain consists of three elements: a contract, an immutable data structure, and cryptography. A wide number of variants of these three elements exist, and they can be combined in a variety of fashions in order to achieve an immutable record with as much of the information encrypted as the designers wish. This tutorial touches on variants of the contract and aspects of cryptography such as zero-knowledge proofs and quadratic span programs. It was previously given at ICSA 2018 and the 2017 International Conference on Software Security and Assurance.

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We want our organizations and systems to be agile. We want them to evolve with the needs of the business, its customers, and its stakeholders and to be resilient in the face of ever-changing market conditions and the external environment. This level of adaptability and responsiveness needs to be supported by the architecture of the systems we create. The complexity of the environment that architects find themselves in is increasing in recent years, with cloud, DevOps, continuous deployment, microservices, and other elements adding to the factors that architects must consider. With this growing complexity, architects need to be supported by effective decision-making approaches.

Size is also a factor. Larger systems and larger organizations have, by definition, a larger number of dependencies (internal and external) that must be managed and a larger number of stakeholders (internal and external) whose needs must be addressed. The architecture of larger systems can involve hundreds or thousands of people, creating dozens to hundreds of products, components, and subsystems that all need to work together. Maintaining the conceptual integrity of the architecture under such circumstances, and over time, presents many challenges and a greater need for coherence.

To navigate all of this, agile architects need to be adaptive; they need the ability to dynamically shift their decision-making approach to match the complexity of the circumstances they face. This session will describe how lessons from complexity science—and in particular, sense making and the Cynefin framework—can help architects be more agile in how they work and, in turn, help them develop architectures that are more agile and adaptive to the needs of the organizations they serve.

Learning Outcomes
* Applying sense making in the context of architecture
* Applying the Cynefin framework to architecture problems and decisions
* Examples of architecture problems and decisions that can be mapped to the different domains represented by the Cynefin framework (obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disordered)
* How to manage the transition of architecture problems between these different domains
* Implications for organization structure and communications
* How such an approach leads to a more resilient architecture and a more antifragile organization
* How complexity thinking and the Cynefin framework supports emergent architecture
* How complexity thinking and the Cynefin framework help the organization and the architecture be more agile

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Being agile, with its attention to extensive testing, frequent integration, and focusing on important product features, has proven invaluable to many software teams. When building complex systems, it can be all too easy to focus primarily on features and overlook software qualities, specifically those related to the architecture. Some believe that by simply following agile practices—starting as fast as possible, keeping code clean, and having lots of tests—a good architecture will magically emerge. While an architecture will emerge, if there is not enough attention paid to it and the code, technical debt and design problems will creep in until it becomes muddy, making it hard to deliver new features quickly and reliably.

It is essential to have a sustainable architecture that can evolve through the project lifecycle. Sustainable architecture requires ongoing attention, especially when there are evolving priorities, a lot of technical risk, and many dependencies. This talk presents a set of patterns that focus on practices for creating and evolving a software architecture while being agile. These practices include a set of tools that allow teams to define “enough” architecture in the beginning of the project and to manage the state and the evolution of the architecture as the project evolves.

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Combining agile with architecture practices requires careful thought. At CGI, we have developed a maturity model for agile architecture, based on our ample experience tuning the architecture way of working to the agility required in different contexts.

The Agile Architecture Maturity Framework measures the architecture function’s maturity in an organization by looking at 11 key behaviors in four categories: understanding context, architectural decision making, validation, and fulfillment. The value of the architectural contribution depends on the proficiency and habits of those involved. Using this model, the maturity of the architecture function in an agile or traditional context can be measured by observing evidence and counter-evidence in daily practices. The knowledge gathered by applying the model is used to identify the most beneficial areas of improvement and to establish baselines and measure progress in improvement programs.

In this tutorial, we will take an in-depth look at the 11 behaviors that are good indicators of agile architecture maturity. Participants will assess their own organization's maturity level by scoring themselves, after which we will briefly compare notes and see if we can identify patterns. Attendants learn how to identify the most effective improvements in their team's way of working.

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