Being wrong is frustrating, wasteful, sometimes embarrassing, and yet … inevitable. Especially with respect to software architecture, if you are never wrong, you are not challenging yourself enough and are not learning. But being wrong is psychologically painful enough that most people avoid it, primarily by never checking their work.
Some people think they can't test the architecture of a software product without building the whole thing. However, software architecture is not a single thing; it results from many decisions, each of which can be isolated and evaluated through experimentation.
While we can't avoid being wrong sometimes, we can reduce the cost of being wrong by running small experiments to test our assumptions and reverse wrong decisions before their costs compound. But here, time is the enemy. There is never enough time to test every assumption, so knowing which ones to confront is the art of architecting.
Successful architecting also means experimenting to test decisions that affect the system architecture, i.e. those decisions that are "fatal" to the success of the product you are building if you are wrong.
Knowing what to test is half the problem; the other half is devising effective but low-cost experiments that reveal flaws in one's assumptions.
This is the key idea behind the concept we call the Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA). The MVA is a set of decisions you believe will enable the increment of the system or product to sustainably deliver value over time.
The complete article explores the attributes of a good experiment.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Pierre Pureur and Kurt Bittner, "Software Architecture and the Art of Experimentation".
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