Architecture Review
Is delivery going slower and slower over time, while becoming more unpredictable? Do some changes take long or even turn out to be impossible in the current system? Even simple changes can take ages to implement, and adding extra developers has no effect. You know there is something going on with the systems architecture, but neither you nor your developers can pinpoint what. So in practice, business pressure to deliver features wins over investing in improving the architecture.
As a manager, it is often hard to get an understanding of system architecture quality and risks, and the impact on product quality, predictability, and delivery speed. How do you make good decisions about what to invest in and what risks need to be addressed? How do you decide on rebuilding vs. incremental redesign? What interventions can you do from a leadership position? How do you balance architecture investments with feature pressure?
Why us
We can provide an objective assessment of the systems architecture and code quality. As external reviewers with extensive experience across several domains, we are able to see signals and patterns that are hard to spot for internal employees.
An architecture review will provide insight into e.g. technical risks, improvement opportunities, alignment of architecture with business and product goals.
The architecture review outcomes will enable you to make better decisions on what risks to address and what investments to make.
Why us
We are hands-on software practitioners with tens of years of experience in analysis, design, and implementation of software in environments ranging from J2EE, through Smalltalk and Haskell to embedded software, SaaS, mobile apps, and Single Page Applications. We have extensive experience in carrying out architecture reviews across different domains and organisations, including healthcare, transport, finance, government, non-profit, embedded, and technical automation.
Benefits
The outcomes of an architecture review will help you:
- identify the main quality attributes and how well the architecture realizes them;
- find end-to-end paths through software and hardware that are critical to the business;
- address the biggest risks first;
- decide where to focus improvement efforts;
- achieve a better balance between feature work and architecture work;
- achieve better alignment of the architecture with business strategy and product;
- make better decisions on rewrites, migration projects, and modernization initiatives;
- find a language to explain architecture risks to other stakeholders.
Approach
An architecture review usually consists of the following steps:
- Kick-off session to determine scope, objectives, and stakeholders
- Perform interviews with stakeholders
- Inspect code, documents, CI/CD pipelines, and other materials
- Present intermediate findings
- Present findings to stakeholders
- Deliver an architecture review report
Deliverables
- a report with findings, including main quality attributes, risk assessment, and recommendations;
- an executive summary with key findings;
- one or more presentations for management and the teams that are involved.
Alternative options
Alternatively, we can do a short project audit, where we investigate a project based on your questions, through interviews, observation, and inspection of code, documents, and other materials. We report our findings back to you. Based on our findings, we propose how we can proceed, for example, with hands-on mentoring, one-on-one coaching, or additional training.
It can be useful to broaden the review scope and include a team proficiency scan. This will give you a more complete picture of both teams and software.