Strategic Monoliths and Microservices: Driving Innovation Using Purposeful Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Vernon))

“Domain expert engagement is to architecture as end user engagement is to feature development. You should find that end users and domain experts are your most treasured contacts in Lean and Agile projects”

As an example of using a methodology or process execution framework, Scrum identifies four primary reasons to place an item in the product backlog: Features Bugs Technical Work Knowledge Acquisition It’s disappointing that Knowledge Acquisition is consigned to last place, because it should always be in first place. How can a team place a new featur

This is a good place to introduce the idea of using an engineering model approach to software development as opposed to the contractor model. First consider the typical contractor model. Under this model, whether used by employees or actual contractors, developers must be given accurate tasks to work on, and they must not fail in even small ways. T

Imitation is not a strategy. Differentiation is.

In the end, making some decisions early on is irresponsible. For example, settling upfront on architecture, such as using Microservices, or trying to create generalized solutions and modeling abstractions, is wrong. These decisions should be postponed until we prove that those choices are justified and necessary.

Assertion: Those who want to build good software that innovates must get this communication–learning–innovation pathway right before trying anything else.

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’” —Steve Jobs

A business capability answers the “What?” question regarding the means by which the company will generate revenues. A substantive question with regard to a business capability is “How?” Impact Mapping, discussed in Chapter 2 in the section “Strategic Delivery on Purpose,” explains driving software deliverables starting with the question “Why?” By t

Even so, problems will occur when trying to apply Bounded Contexts with distributed computing before the teams have a good reason to, or when trying to understand the strategic goals and solve business problems using single-process modularity first. Such a bias will likely lead to over-engineered technical approaches, putting too much emphasis on t