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Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Defining Evolutionary Architecture with Neal Ford

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Technology, Careers, Business

4.558 Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2016

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this 13-minutes long ThoughtWorks Beacon podcast, Neal Ford, a software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, shares his working definition of "evolutionary architecture." "Here is our working definition of evolutionary architecture," Neal says. "An evolutionary architecture supports incremental guided change as a first principle along multiple dimensions." He also talks about the upcoming book on the topic he is co-authoring with ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Lead Developer and Agile Coach Patrick Kua. Stay tuned. You'll hear much more about this topic from Neal, Rebecca, and Pat as time goes on.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the ThoughtWorks Beacon podcast.

0:02.9

I'm Neil Ford, and I'm here by myself today.

0:06.6

I'm a software architect and meme wrangler here at ThoughtWorks,

0:10.4

and one of the projects that I'm working on right now in that capacity is a book on evolutionary architecture,

0:16.9

which is a subject that I've been talking about for a while and been thinking about even longer.

0:21.8

And so has my colleague or CTO Rebecca Parsons.

0:25.4

She has also thought quite a lot about this subject.

0:28.3

And my colleague in the UK, Pat Kwa, as well.

0:32.0

So the three of us have gotten together and we're merging all of our ideas about what this idea of evolutionary architecture means.

0:40.1

And one of the things that we are in the process of developing is a definition of what we mean

0:46.4

by evolutionary architecture.

0:48.4

So we're still in the early days of this project, so this is very much a working definition.

0:53.0

So it very well may change

0:55.7

either minorly or significantly by the time we get finished with this work.

1:00.0

But for now, this is what we're working at.

1:03.2

And really, this idea of evolutionary architecture, we think, is important because the software

1:09.5

development world lives in the state of dynamic equilibrium

1:13.6

where everything is fine until some new factor comes in and has a wide-reaching influence

1:21.6

and it upsets the equilibrium and the system has to come to a new, a steady state.

1:29.4

We see this all the time in physics.

1:32.7

You see this in the phenomenon of molecular diffusion.

1:36.3

But the software development ecosystem works that way as well.

...

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