Slicing your architecture pt. 2 -- risk and organisational debt

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Yesterday we discussed the risk of mis-slicing your architecture. Today, I’d like to discuss how to slice it safely.

Before we get into the thick of it, we should take a step back and understand what makes a good architecture.

I could throw all sorts of technical terms at you, like the Single-Responsibility Principle, or the Open-Close Principle, or many other important-sounding Principles.

I want to talk about something else: dealing with risk.

Slicing your architecture without slicing your fingers

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You know those good old-fashioned mandolin slicers (yes I had to look that term up)?

The ones you can use to slice carrots or cucumbers or something, maybe for a salad?

Whenever I use one, I’m really apprehensive. They’re really sharp, and really close to my fingers. It’s pretty much a given that I take off a slice of my finger when I attempt to use such a contraption.

Root causes are for cowards

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“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H.L. Mencken

And that’s the problem with root causes.

Any reasonably complex system will have multiple safeguards against failure.

Yet all systems will end up failing sooner or later.

Of course, any self-respecting engineering organisation will perform a post-mortem once this happens: inspect the failure, try to find out how it came to pass, and try to find ways this failure won’t happen again.

Jira, the Swiss army chainsaw

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Do you use Jira in your organisation? Or are you considering it?

If you, you might be interested in this Tweet I spotted recently:

using Jira commonly leads to some predictable dysfunctions. Some of these are:

* Scrum confusion and tool-owned processes
* Micro-management due to integration of Product and Sprint Backlog
* No shared team responsibility due to poor Sprint Backlog
* Micromanagement,little or no agency for the team in organising their workflow,
* complex work management workflows,
* artificial metrics obsession without going to the gemba,
* dislocated teams.

Jira has little reason to exist outside reinforcing these problems.

Whoa, harsh. Can someone pass the burn cream, please?

On terible silos and not terrrible ones

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I’d like to write about organisation today.

It’s all the rage these days to complain about silos. Silos are bad, people say, they’re the old way of doing things.

But what’s a silo, in DevOps parlance, and why is it bad?

I mean, I agree “silo sounds kind of bad – soulless maybe, or not very sophisticated.

I suppose few people would like to work in a “test silo”, for instance, or a “database silo”.

The third way

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Fine, so you’ve taken steps to use Gene Kim’s First and Second Way.

You’ve got an amazing pipeline set up, product increments are flying through it at an eye-watering pace. You’ve set up a bunch of feedback mechanisms, tracking metrics, feeding information from the pipeline back upstream where it is eagerly consumed by your team. You’ve got all the hallmarks of an efficient system, cranking out stable releases. Quite rightly, you are the envy of friends and opponents alike.