Architectural Decisions – Accidental or On Purpose?

“Every interesting software-intensive system has an architecture. While some of these architectures are intentional, most appear to be accidental.” - Grady Booch (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=471929 )

Last week I wrote about what software architecture is and that I rely on a software architecture consisting of goals which map to structure and behavior. But in my everyday work in the field of software design, I rarely get the luxury of creating such a complete mapping.

What typically happens is that I join a project that already has had the vision established and may not have any artifacts explaining that vision. I have to do some archeology in the code to discover what the original vision was. And more often than not, there are several conflicting visions in place.
Typically where I work, we make design and architecture decisions on a daily basis. And as we iterate through our work and develop code and test our solutions, we find changes we need to make. To make sure these decisions are accidental and that they merge with our team’s vision of our architecture, we meet weekly to review changes. We often argue.

Part of my job as a software architect is to examine and analyze various points of view from team. There are two tools I use that are invaluable to getting the team to converge on a solution (and sometimes convergence is not possible, and a decision has to be made, but in the majority of cases, convergence does occur).

The first tool is a decision matrix. This is from the book “Getting Started in Project Management” by Martin and Tate (http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Project-Management/dp/0471135038 ) - double click the image to get a close up:



This works well but is very quantitative and the human nuances of decision making are often lost in this format. We also sometimes break the rule above “Do not change the numbers to affect the selection of a “favored” solution.”

My favorite format is to use a Mind Map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map). And the tool I use is Mind Manager (http://www.mindjet.com/ ) but there are free tools available for download and templates available for Visio.
Here are two the templates I work with:






I just noticed that I have hundreds, yes, hundreds of these maps in place. We refer back to them when we forget why we made a certain decision and when someone new to the team questions the decision. Sometimes we re-evaluate our decision and use our map as a launch point to see why our thinking as changed.

In the article Booch says:

"Thus, having an accidental architecture is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as
• the decisions that make up that architecture are made manifest and
• the essential ones are made visible as soon as they are instituted and then are allowed to remain visible throughout the meaningful life of that system."

By using these tools you can achieve, and thrive, with an accidental architecture. Let me know if these tools are useful to you or what tools you use.