Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change

Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping together Lego blocks. John D. Cook

Every company is now a software company. Forbes Magazine, Nov. 30, 2011

The biggest single common impediment to building evolutionary architecture is intractable operations. If developers cannot easily deploy changes, all parts of the feedback cycle are hampered.

The engineering practices in continuous delivery address the factors that slow down software releases, and those practices should be considered axiomatic for evolutionary architecture to be successful.

Speed of evolution is a function of cycle time; faster cycle time allows faster evolution.

Many companies reside in the transition zone between older practices and new. They may have solved low hanging fruit like continuous integration but still have largely manual testing. While it slows cycle time, it is important to include manual stages in deployment pipelines. First, it treats each stage of an application’s build the same — as a sta