Architecture Without Big Design Up Front

Peter ProvostSr. Program ManagerMicrosoft Corporation

TL15

How many times have you walked into a legacy codebase and had no idea what was there? All systems have an architecture,

whether you plan it or not Most systems today have evolved

into Big Ball of Mud architectures Understanding and discovering what

is there is a serious challenge today

Ending with a system you want and can maintain is more important than defining the right thing before you start

Introduction

Everyone has existing code bases Key architectural elements

are undocumented Maintenance is hard, changes are expensive

What can we do?

Let’s begin by discovering what we have using Architecture Explorer…

Architectural Discovery

Architectural DiscoveryThe Big Picture

demo

Architectural Discovery

Digging Deeper

demo

Architectural Discovery

demo

Key dependencies

Architectural anti-patterns The “death star” dependency diagram Important layering and dependency

management issues

Now let’s look at one of those key components in greater detail…

Results And Next Steps

Reverse EngineeringSequence Diagrams

demo

Reverse EngineeringClass Diagrams

demo

Results And Next Steps

So far we have discovered… Namespace issues A few key classes may be overly complex Better understanding how to add our change

Create new models to describe the architecture we want at a high level Layer Diagram with Validation Component Diagrams Class Diagrams Activity Diagrams

Communicating With ModelsProject System and Version Control

demo

Communicating With ModelsUsing Team Foundation Server

demo

Results And Next Steps

Continue to use models as appropriate to communicate the work that needs to be done Class Diagrams Component Diagrams Activity Diagrams Use Case Diagrams

Check them into version control and associate them with work items

How Does This Relate To Agile?

For agile teams, Architecture is a way to organize and communicate about work and not to define the work

All agile teams use models. They just don’t often do a lot of modeling up front

Agile teams will create models on the fly as needed to describe, design and define a candidate design for a user story or task

In today’s globally disbursed environments, whiteboards won’t always suffice. We need to share in a way that can cross geographies and time zones

Conclusions

Every system has an architecture, the trick is figuring out what you have and what you want to do

Communicating effectively with your entire team is paramount

Architectural modeling and discovery tooling is useful regardless of development methodology

Session Title Speaker Day Time Location

TL47 Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010

Cameron Skinner 10/27 11:00 AM – 12:15PM Room 153

TL52 Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features Brian Harry 10/27 03:30 PM – 04:45 PM Room 151

TL03 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services

Habib Heydarian; Justin Marks

10/27 03:30 PM – 04:45 PM Room 515A

TL09 Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio Lori Lamkin; Sunder Raman

10/27 05:15 PM – 06:30 PM Room 502A

TL45 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Database Edition: Overview

Gert Drapers 10/27 05:15 PM – 06:30 PM Room 501B

TL59 Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks John Cunningham 10/28 12:45PM – 01:30 PM Room 409A

TL37 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Leveraging Virtualization to Improve Code Quality with Team Lab

Ram Cherala 10/29 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM Room 408B

TL61 Panel: The Future of Unit Testing Euan Garden, Jim Newkirk, Peter Provost, Nikolai Tillmann

10/29 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM Room 406A

TL60 Improving Code Quality with Code Analysis Ravs Kaur 10/29 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM Room 409A

TL24 Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

Steve Carroll;Ed Glas

10/29 01:15 PM – 02:30 PM Room 153

TL15 Architecture without Big Design Up Front Peter Provost 10/29 04:45 PM – 06:00 PM Room 403

TL04 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft

Stephanie Saad 10/30 08:30 AM : 9:45AM Room 151

TL51 Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex

Mike BarnettNikolai Tillmann

10/30 08:30 AM : 9:45AM Room 403

Related Sessions

VSTS 2010 Hands On Labs

HOL Code Title

TLHOL07 VSTS 2010: Project Planning, Management, and Design

TLHOL08 VSTS 2010: Architecture Tools

TLHOL09 VSTS 2010: Team Foundation Server

TLHOL10 VSTS 2010: Software Quality

TLHOL11 VSTS 2010: Diagnostics and Performance

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