Student Q&A: Dealing with Architecture in Agile w/ Devin Hedge

This week Devin Hedge joins Dave Prior for another student question. This time about architecture and if the complexity of it would be better served by a waterfall approach: The Question: "How to plan for the Architecture effectively. With waterfall, we try to figure out all aspects of the business and the technical solution in advance before we start development. In Agile, we discover as we go. It's very likely that when we come to a certain, we'll find either the current business logic or the current technical framework cannot adapt our upcoming demands. There's a high opportunity that we'll need to destroy all the work that we've done. Talking in this perspective, isn't waterfall better than Agile?" Show Notes 00:08 Interview Begins 00:51 This week’s question 02:00 What do we mean by architecture 02:29 The design principles and standards you need in place to support your work 03:35 If it isn’t loosely coupled, neither waterfall or agile can really help 04:17 Challenging the assumption that big up front planning could help you eliminate the risk of having to do rework and whether or not waterfall is actually supposed to do that 07:43 If we can’t eliminate the risk of not knowing everything up front, what can you do? 08:30 Devin puts on his architect hat - guardrails and guideposts 09:53 Reframing the problem 10:40 How physical building architects are still designing even after the building is built - you never know what the tenants of the building will actually want 11:48 The risk of making decisions too early 12:18 Advice from Devin on how to reduce your risk of designing architecture up front and put up the guardrails and guideposts you need 14:14 How architects look at the work and decision making 17:02 Making decisions at the last possible responsible moment 17:43 Having a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset 19:10 Is there value in waiting to make your decisions until you have all the information? What is your cost of delay of waiting to make the decisions? 20:57 Devin’s upcoming events: Agile Budgeting and Cost Tracking for the PMI North Carolina Chapter on July 11 and PMI South Carolina on July 20 21:57 How to get in touch with Devin 22:47 Interview Ends Links from the podcast Does Agile addresses the 25 point Federal IT Reformation plan? (June 29) PMI Washington DC http://conta.cc/2sov4vn Agile: Budgeting for Agile Financial cost planning/tracking (July 11) PMI North Carolina http://bit.ly/2tmVMZz Jeff Bezos Memo about Cloud Services http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/ Contacting Devin LeadingAgile: www.leadingagile.com/guides/devin-hedge/ Twitter: twitter.com/agiledevin LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/devinhedge Contacting Dave LeadingAgile: www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com Twitter: twitter.com/mrsungo Personal Blog: drunkenpm.net LeadingAgile CSM & CSPO Classes For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com