Strategic Design: Embrace Imperfection!

Idealized architecture bores me or occasionally frightens me. When it isn’t leading us in disastrous crusades, it is irrelevant. We have legacy systems that aren’t going away. We have some talented teams and some who are less so. We make mistakes as we go along. A practical architecture isn’t just a destination; it should give you a path from where you are now to someplace better. It should accommodate quality tradeoffs and design triage. I’ll share a few approaches that have helped me with these issues, with a focus on establishing boundaries between software with different conceptual approaches and discipline levels.