#2782

Application Architecture and the Agile Architecture Method

On Tuesday at the p&p Summit in Redmond J.D. Meier talked for the first time about the work he’s been doing on the new Application Architecture Guide 2.0 for p&p. We’ve just released a beta of this on CodePlex and are discussing some of the thinking behind it with the community.

One of the things J.D. talked about was the Agile Architecture Method, which is something that has fallen out of the enormous amount of thinking and research his team has been doing while working on the Guide.

What’s that all about? Well in short it can be summarized as follows…

“Our Agile Architecture Method is an iterative and incremental approach for designing architectures. 

To summarize, it’s a technique that:

• Scopes and focuses your architecture exercise.
• Uses scenarios to drive the design and evaluate potential solutions.
• Helps you think through your choice of application type, deployment, architectural style and technologies.
• Helps you quickly iterate through potential solutions.
• Helps you map potential patterns.

If you read J.D’s blog post on this you’ll see that it’s an iterative technique that you can reply repeatedly throughout your development process.

“You can iteratively flesh out your architecture as you work through your design and discover more details that impact your architecture.  You don’t have to design your architecture in a single iteration. Do not get lost in the details; focus on the big steps and build a framework on which you can base your architecture and design.”

He’s working to incorporating this approach into the Architecture Guide. If you have any feedback on this or other aspects of the guide I’d encourage you to download the beta from CodePlex and give J.D. feedback.