When Good Architecture Goes Bad

Question

The Methods & Tools newsletter has just released in its html archive section the article "When Good Architecture Goes Bad". Every developer eventually encounters it at some stage in his or her career – the code that no one understands and that no one wants to touch in case it breaks. Sound familiar? But how did the software get that bad? Presumably no one set out to make it like that? The answer is that the software is suffering from Software Erosion – the constant decay of the internal structure of a software system that occurs in all phases of software development and maintenance

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=85

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http://www.martinig.ch

Answer 1

I read the article and agree that Software Erosion is a good term to descibe what happens to systems as they grow.

Software erosion could also be called "coding without design" and trying to avoid it is the main reason software companies hire architects.

Bypassing design and having developers add features without any sort of design is a very common practice and it is very efficient in the short term.   

Answer 2

short term as you said, but personally i feel that higher management always never put into consideration how much recurring cost and time it's causing. In my case, my management always irk at the idea of assigning a skilled and "permanent" architect to projects. They always think that hiring architects to do solutioning is a bad idea due to their high cost and deceivingly "low" involvement in projects. 

In their eyes, if the software engineers, senior, junior and development lead can get the project rolled out within the contract schedule, why bother to hire an architect which can be translated to 4-5 junior developers in terms of salary. With the 4-5 developers can can throw in a senior and construct another project! can an architect do that?

But due to their understanding or "misunderstanding", an architect will actually lay out good fundamental designs and good solutions that will lessen or eliminate the need for developers to look back at the same codes over and over again and wasting time to think of low level solutions.

If only higher management are actually technically inclined and really understanding a full SDLC, the costs of recurring nightmares, if only...

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Never stop learning.

Answer 3

Companies can take architectural consulting if cannot afford full time architects.

 

Answer 4

Some times Architect design the system well but implementation by developers goes wrong. so Architectural consulting can help only if he is part of initial implementation also.

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srini