For architects designing complex solutions, a well-documented set of requirements can never be the sole basis of the architecture. Architects have to undestand why these specific requirements are relevant to their stakeholders, and most likely will have to ask “why?” again and again to understand the stakeholders’ real needs, so as to design the architecture that best fulfills those needs and the goals behind them.  When talking to architects about their work, I often summarize this principle as “Architecture is Context”.

The importance of context

What makes it so important for architects to understand the wider context of their solution? When we view architecture as a set of design decisions, a good measure of a decision’s architectural significance is the economic impact of that decision on the collective stakeholders affected by it (see RCDA: Architecting as a Risk- and Cost Management Discipline). So in order for architects to understand the significance of their decisions, they need to have a firm grasp of the economic context of the solution they are architecting.

A second reason architects need to understand context and background is because requirements (especially non-functional or quality attribute requirements) often turn out to cause conflicts in design decisions: for example, making certain company data available in a mobile app may be good for  productivity, but bad for security.  Architects can only make these types of trade-offs if they not only know the requirements, but also fully understand the business and technology drivers behind them (asking your stakeholders to prioritize NFRs doesn’t really help, since this quickly becomes a meaningless exercise if it is done separate from the design – see Issues Dealing with Non-Functional Requirements across the Contractual Divide).

Flavors of context

A complex solution has many types of stakeholders, each of which have their own goals and needs, contributing to the integral solution context. When focusing on economic impact, the first thing that comes to mind is the business context defined by the business stakeholders, who pay for or benefit from the solution. Architectural significance, however, is determined by a much wider range of stakeholders. Examples are operational and delivery stakeholders, for whom we need to understand the technology and project/release context, and citizens affected by the solution’s safety, security and privacy context.

Understanding context

What can architects do to improve their understanding of a solution’s context, and design architectures that better fit their stakeholders’ underlying needs?

• Talk to stakeholders. Architects who talk to their stakeholders get a better understanding of their context – well duh, talk about kicking in an open door. And yet… I still run into architects that are so focused on documentation, or on a particular subset of stakeholders, that they forget to interact with the rest. This goes both ways: being too exclusively focused on your technical stakeholders (“architects must code!”) is as bad as only being interested in “the business” side of things. Make sure you speak your stakeholders’ language – watch Jochem Schulenklopper’s SATURN 2015 talk “Why they just don’t get it” if you want to know how. Without actually talking to stakeholders, my other two tips (modeling context and trace decisions to context) lose most of their value.
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  Example of a system context diagram

  Modeling context. Modeling system context has been part of software design methodologies since the early days. In the 70s, the Yourdon Structured Design method involved a context diagram, which showed which external systems and users interacted with a system – a technique many (including me) still consider essential for clarifying the solution boundary and external dependencies. In fact, the first C in Simon Brown’s C4 model stands for Context, represented by just such a context diagram. UML’s use case diagrams fulfill a similar role (but much less clearly). Michael Jackson’s problem frames go a step further by modeling not just physical and logical context of the system itself, but also the wider context needed to understand the design problem to be solved.

• Trace design decisions to context. Once we have gone to all the trouble of understanding the context of the solution we are architecting, it is paramount that we record the impact of that understanding on our architecture. The perfect place to do that is in the ‘rationale’ section of our architectural decision record. Here is where we show that our decision is based on something in the real world, real concerns, goals or other drivers from our stakeholders. This not only helps us get buy-in for the decision, but also brings huge benefits if the context changes (or should I say “when the context changes”, because it usually does). If we have to revisit an architectural decision, knowing the full context of the original decision rationale makes re-appraising the trade-offs much easier. Putting it in economic terms, tracing your architectural decisions to their context lowers the cost of change – making your architecture more agile.

In conclusion, context is key in architecture, and there are several ways in which architects can improve their understanding of context and its impact. The most important tip is to talk to your stakeholders, and keep asking them “why?”. What is your take on this? Do you always draw a context diagram? How much context do you put in your architectural decision records?

One of the things architects can learn from the Agile mindset is the importance of short feedback loops. The quicker an architect receives feedback on their output, the faster they learn about its effect in their specific solution context – and better informed architects make better decisions. Architecture is a matter of reducing uncertainty by gathering knowledge and making decisions, and a shorter architecture feedback loop speeds up that uncertainty reduction, leading to better architectures. On top of this, shorter loops lead to shorter reaction times when things change, which increases agility. In this blog post, I will share some tips for shortening the architectural feedback loop.

Architectural decisions are your primary deliverable

What does your organization consider the primary architectural deliverable? Chances are it is a document with a name like Project (Start) Architecture or Software Architecture Description – let’s call it The Architecture Document. It takes weeks or even months to produce, after which time all architectural models and decisions are approved and distributed in one foul swoop – The Architecture Document version 1.0. If you are in this situation, the first step to shortening your feedback loop is to start viewing individual architectural decisions as your primary deliverable. The finer granularity of these decisions, compared to The Architecture Document, will make it much easier to speed up the feedback loop.

Continuously share concerns and decisions

Do not be afraid to share your unfinished architecture output. The sooner you share, the faster you learn. I like to let my stakeholders (both business and technical) know what I think are the most critical architectural concerns, and share decisions as soon as I am aware that they need to be taken. (One word of caution: always make sure the status of the decision-in-progress is absolutely clear to prevent people acting on them prematurely.) This gives stakeholders the opportunity to contribute to the architectural process from the start. Make this information as easy as possible to access: don’t put it in text documents, but find a low-threshold platform like a Wiki or issue tracking system.

Invite immediate feedback from stakeholders

We are often hesitant to ask for feedback on something that we ourselves do not consider to be perfect already. Architects, however, cannot afford to wait that long. Most architectures emerge from a dynamic process of frequently identifying new concerns, repeatedly finding out new facts and continuously adjusting partial decisions that interact with each other and our context. The perfect architecture is only known after the solution has been delivered (if then).

So tell your stakeholders to give you feedback when they have it, and not to wait for ‘official’ review moments like a ‘version 0.9’. Make it as easy as possible for them: enable the comments box on your Wiki, invite people to email you. If big print-outs of your architectural models adorn the team’s war-room, make sure to put a pencil on a string next to them. Make sure everyone knows you welcome feedback by asking for it at the water cooler, or on your team chat platform if you are not co-located.

Simplify your architecture documentation template

Template bloat is one of the causes of long architectural feedback loops. Organizations often lack a decent repository for architectural knowledge, and abuse their architecture documentation templates as a dumping place for all lessons learned. Diverse stakeholder concerns for all types of solutions end up getting their own sections in the template. On top of that, architects for whom The Architecture Document is the only place to store knowledge about a solution cause even more bloat. There are two things you can do to fight this document obesity:

• Create a template with sections for only the most common concerns at only the start of a solution’s lifecycle. Get rid of all ‘placeholder’ sections. Add views for other concerns only as they become significant later in the lifecycle, and only insofar as they are relevant to your context – in short, create living, minimal architecture documentation.
• Make sure you have another repository for knowledge that is not immediately relevant at the current point in the solution lifecycle. Create a wiki or library for the organization’s lessons learned and documentation plug-ins for views to be added later in the lifecycle, and find a place outside of The Architecture Document for solution-specific insights that you have gathered.

Get involved in delivery

The final tip for an effective, short feedback loop is to get involved in the delivery of your solution. If you are a software architect, coding key parts of the solution yourself is a great way to get involved. If you do not have that opportunity, get involved in integration, quality attribute testing or other architecturally significant delivery activities. You will not only become your own feedback channel, but also stimulate other delivery team members to tell you about their concerns and help improve your architecture.

In my work of coaching organizations to approach architecting in an agile way, shortening the architectural feedback loop has proven to be one of the most effective ways to improve architects’ effectivity and business value. Especially its positive effect on the scability of architecture work and the start-up time of smaller projects is quickly noticed and appreciated by business stakeholders. Let me know if the five tips in this post prove to be useful to you as well.

When I teach architecture classes, I increasingly run into architects who never architect a “system”. They do all the things architects do: analyse stakeholder needs, identify ways to address these needs, (help) decide on the best way by making trade-offs, communicate these decisions and oversee the solution’s implementation. However, after all the work is done, the stakeholder needs are fulfilled, but there is nothing in the real world that they can point to and say: “that is the thing I architected”. At the end of the road, the implementation of their solution to the stakeholder needs consisted of a series of changes to existing systems, but did not require the creation of a new system. Their job is to architect transient solutions: changes to a domain or product they are responsible for.

One example was brought to me by the architect responsible for a transportation ticket vending machine. There was a stakeholder need to reduce the time and cost required to deploy new products and user interaction schemes, and the solution was to move most of the logic and data from the vending machine to a central place. Projects like this require significant (and careful) design effort, and substantial implementation time. A documented solution architecture is a must. However, at the end of the road, no new systems have been created (with the possible exception of minor components like hubs between previously unconnected systems).

Depending on the prevailing flavor of delivery governance, such transient solutions are defined in architecture epics, project documents or change requests. The architects designing them call themselves “domain architect”, “project architect”, “tech lead” or “master builder”.

What’s in a name

Is this really architecture? The ISO 42010 definitions of architecting and architecture both refer to a “system” of interest, e.g. “fundamental concepts or properties of a system in its environment embodied in its elements, relationships, and in the principles of its design and evolution”. All the other words seem to apply, so can we ignore the fact that there is no one “system” to point to after implementation of the architecture? Is this question really relevant, as long as the person designing these solutions knows how to apply architecting principles and practices?

If this is architecture, what type of architecture is it? Of all the different genres of architecture (software, infrastructure, system, enterprise architecture, etc.) the term solution architecture seems to best cover these transient solutions. This phenomenon actually helps us to create an appropriate definition for the term solution in solution architecture. Where previously we had to make do with something like “a solution is a way to solve a problem”, I would suggest the following:

Solution: a coherent set of changes delivered to address a defined set of stakeholder needs.

The changes referred to in this definition pertain to elements which can be newly created, modified or removed as part of the solution. The term coherent implies that the (changes to the) elements cooperate to achieve the fulfillment of the stakeholder needs (using Fred Brooks’ term, the solution has conceptual integrity). Coordination of a solution’s delivery depends on the governance model applied, this can be using agile or traditional delivery models, in a value stream, in a program or project, governed by a contract or otherwise. How and where the stakeholder needs are defined also depends on the governance model applied, this can be in an epic or set of (user) stories, but also in a program or project definition, contract or change request. From the perspective of this definition of solution, architecting a new system or service is just a special case where the “set of changes” consist of the creation of one new system or service.

Applying architecture practices

How does this way of looking at solution architecture affect the way we apply architecture practices? To explore this question, let’s take Risk- and Cost-Driven Architecture (RCDA) as our reference practices. As stated in the introduction, most core practices apply to both transient solutions and to system (or system of systems) solutions:

As you can see from this brief analysis, the main differences when applying architecture practices occur after the solution has been delivered. The most visible difference is what happens to the architecture documentation, for which it makes no sense to remain “as a unit” after implementation of a transient solution, except for historic reference. Extra care must be taken that the relevant information (such as rationale of architectural decisions) remains available afterwards, either in the documentation of the systems affected, or at a higher level (e.g. in domain or enterprise architecture documentation).

Conclusion

As less and less green field systems are created, an increasing number of architects find themselves mainly designing transient solutions – solutions that dissipate into the landscape and cannot afterwards be identified as a product or system. Good architecture practices are still applicable in this situation. This realization leads to the idea for a defininition of Solution Architecture as the “architecture of a coherent set of changes delivered to address a defined set of stakeholder needs”.