How can you create a good, legible, maintainable component architecture? How can you validate your functional and non-functional requirements?
Yes you are right. You are responsible for architecture decisions at component or subsystem level. Below a set of tools to improve the quality of your design.
Design Approaches
Patterns and Idioms
The pattern movement was started last millennium. Very talented and experienced developers have documented how to solve common problems elegantly and effectively. Depending on the programming language you are using different idioms are preferred. The way to solve the same problem is different in Java, Scala, C++, Python or C#.
You should know all regular structural, behavioral and creational patterns. Explore your programming language and discover how idioms and patterns have evolved between major releases. For example lambda expressions and streams introduced in Java 8 - released Spring 2014 - completely transform the solution for regular business logic. Records introduced in Java 14 - released Spring 2020 - have a huge impact how your architecture deals with data transfer objects - DTO - and immutability.
Read Open Source Code
Stop inventing the wheel again and again. Avoid Not Invented Here syndrome. Your current problem was already solved multiple times. Explore open source solutions, read posts, study books. Select the most adequate solution and fill free to improve it.
Instead of searching for a solution for days, post your question on an adequate forum or on Stack Overflow. Again fill free to improve the suggested solutions.
Become more efficient and use the wisdom of all these developers accessible through the Internet. And always verify the quality and adequacy of their proposed solution.
Java Standard API
Know your programming language and the huge associated standard libraries part of your technology stack. Wisdom is coded in this code. Standard patterns are implemented in almost all packages. Idioms are encoded everywhere.
See how Java deals with human and machine time with the java.time package. Decades of trials and errors were needed to finally create a balanced and simple to use time abstractions. All these decisions and learnings are encoded in this code.
Clean Architecture
Clean Code
You want to create a clean architecture you are proud of. You must first write clean code. Clean architecture build up on clean code. Promote clean code in your agile team. Agile code is clean code.
Do not fall to the fallacy to draw beautiful and useless UML diagram and write thick software architecture documents. The real architecture is hidden in the source code of your product. You still should document all major design decisions.
Know Your Language
If you are developing in Java, you should use the current features of the programming language. For example with with Java 14
- Try with resources and closeable resources
- Immutable collections
- Streams, optionals, filters, and collectors
- Predicates and functions to define lambda expressions
- Records and immutability for objects
- Pattern matching syntactic sugar as for instanceof operator
- Switch expressions
- Text strings
Aggressive Refactoring
The entropy of source code increases over time. Only continuous and aggressive refactoring mitigates the degenerescence of your application. Each time you correct an error or add a new functionality refactor your code. Remove smells, compiler warnings and migrate older code to use newer and better features of your programming language.
Acceptance Test Driven Development
Your users want a working application. Write acceptance tests insuring all relevant functions are tested through your continuous integration pipeline. Therefore you guarantee your users the application behaves as specified.
Test Driven Development
Testability and changeability of your application are architectural aspects. You must have a way to verify these non-functional requirements. Test driven development is a proven approach to fulfill these requirements and validate them continuously.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration and delivery are the mechanisms to continuously validate and verify all functional and non-functional requirements are correctly implemented. You guarantee your users and customers that any software delivery they get is compliant and correct.Each time you find a discrepancy add an additional test validating the requirement behind this fault. Therefore the same error will never happen again.
Good Practices
Publish your components on a central repository such as Maven Central. Your users have easy and standardized access to your components and their latest version. Build tools such as Gradle and Maven or IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA fetch the component with out of the box mechanisms.Javadoc is the standard and hugely helpful approach to document classes and component public interfaces in Java. Similar tools exist for other programming languages.
Architecture design records provide hints why specific design decisions were chosen. Your users can better understand the path you follow and the selected tradeoffs. They do not have to agree but they can understand the arguments why you choose so.
Static code generator is an actual good practice to provide current documentation and tutorials for your components. We write all our documentation in the asciidoc format - including plantUML and highlighted source code - and generate our web site using hugo tool suite.
Start small and improve your approach every day.
Agile Architecture Series
The agile architecture track contains the following blogs- Agile Architecture Principles
- Agile Code is Clean Code!
- Agile Architecture within Scrum
- Agile Component Design
- Legacy Systems Refactoring
- How Agile Collaborators Learn
We also published our agile architecture course (3 ECTS) used for teaching computer science students at bachelor level at Swiss technical universities.
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