Architecture

TOGAF is documentation-heavy and linear. Scrum is iterative and lightweight. Running them together means breaking the Architecture Development Method into sprint-sized chunks instead of treating it as a single pass from Phase A to Phase H. Mapping ADM phases to sprints The ADM doesn’t have to run in one direction. You can treat each phase as a backlog item and pull work through in sprints. TOGAF Phase Scrum equivalent Preliminary Sprint 0 — governance, tools, team setup Phase A: Vision Product backlog epics for the EA vision Phases B-D: Business, Data, Application, Technology One domain per sprint Phase E: Opportunities & Solutions Backlog refinement for implementation Phase F: Migration Planning Roadmap prioritisation Phase G: Implementation Delivery sprints Phase H: Change Management Sprint retrospectives Roles The Enterprise Architect maps closest to Product Owner — they prioritise the architecture backlog. The Architecture Board shows up at sprint reviews. The Scrum Master facilitates the process and removes blockers. ...

I’ve been collecting these over the years. Some are worth more than others, and a few have gone stale, but they’re the ones I keep coming back to. Agile Architect Andrew Johnston’s blog is one of the few places that actually talks about agile in enterprise architecture without treating the two as separate worlds. agilearchitect.org Application Development Trends ADT Magazine has an enterprise section that covers the news and trends. It’s not EA-specific but it’s useful for keeping an eye on what’s moving. adtmag.com ...

I spent a good chunk of last week designing the architecture for a new service. On paper it was clean — well separated concerns, sensible boundaries, tests covering the happy paths. I felt good about it. Then someone asked what this service was going to become in two years time, and I realised I had no idea. Not because the design was bad, but because I had never really thought about it beyond the project itself. I had optimised for getting something built, not for where it was going. ...

Enterprise architecture is the practice that tries to describe and control an organisation’s structure, processes, applications, systems, and technology in an integrated way. The word “tries” does a lot of work in that sentence. Most organisations never actually achieve integration. They accumulate systems, outgrow their documentation, and hire someone to draw boxes and arrows.

An architecture model is not just useful to provide insight into the current or future situation; it can also be used to evaluate the transition from ‘as is’ to ’to be’. The hard part is mapping the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and being honest about which parts of the journey are actually feasible.

Most stakeholders of a system are not interested in its architecture, but only in the impact of this on their concerns. Which is fair enough. The CFO doesn’t care about your service mesh. The marketing lead doesn’t care about your data model. They care about cost, risk, speed, and whether the thing they asked for actually works. The mistake architects make is trying to sell the architecture itself. You don’t lead with diagrams. You lead with outcomes: this change reduces downtime, this pattern cuts deployment time in half, this split lets your team ship independently.

Enterprise Architecture is the structure and the operational blueprint of a company. It’s the difference between a building that holds things together and one that collapses the first time the wind picks up. You don’t notice it when it’s done well. You notice it the moment it’s missing.

Archimate is an open and independent enterprise architecture modelling language that enables organisations to communicate, design, analyse and manage their enterprise architecture in a visual way. It provides a comprehensive and consistent modelling language to describe, visualise, analyse and validate the architecture of an enterprise. The language is developed and maintained by The Open Group, the same body behind TOGAF. The key idea is that enterprise architecture isn’t just about IT systems. It spans business processes, applications, technology infrastructure, and the people and motivations that drive it all. Archimate gives you a common vocabulary across all of those layers so that a business architect, an application architect, and a technology architect can all be talking about the same thing. ...