Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies.

This month, we focus on "From One to Many: Architects, Staff Plus Engineering, and Optimizing Teams". These core topics currently span the entire "diffusion of innovation" graph in this year's Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report. We see increasing adoption of architecture decision records (ADRs), senior individual contributor (IC) career tracks, and team topologies.

Key challenges remain in this space, including being conscious about how architecture decisions are made at scale (and with the required speed) and bringing the social element into the sociotechnical systems in which we all now work.

News

AWS Publishes Guide to Architecture Decision Records

Amazon Web Services has published a guide for using architecture decision records (ADRs). They recommend a process to adopt and review ADRs in software engineering teams. The process results in a collection of approved, rejected, or superseded ADRs in a decision log.

AWS proposed this ADR process to facilitate architectural decision-making, avoid repetitive discussions about the same topics, and communicate decisions effectively.

Five Behaviors of Successful Staff Plus Engineers

Staff plus engineers act as technical leaders with the goal of providing a bigger impact, explained Blanca Garcia Gil at QCon London 2022. Their ability to get things done goes beyond their individual capacity to grow and mentor others. The tech industry has moved away from thinking that engineers work individually, and instead, collaboration is one of the most important behaviors in a staff-plus role.

In her talk, Gil presented five core areas that can benefit anyone in a staff-plus role:

1. Communication and listening
2. Technical strategy
3. Networking and influencing
4. Technical leadership
5. Managing your own career

Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Cognitive Load: a Summary of Community Discussions

Operations engineering is moving in the direction of platform engineering, according to Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb. Majors see platform teams tending to work higher up the stack than operations, DevOps, and SRE teams do. This shift in focus enables organizations to focus their limited development resources on their core product to drive maximum business value.

The Path to a Staff-Plus Engineer Role: From Management Back to Tech

When working in tech, a managerial career may not be for you. Fabiane Bizinella Nardon went from being a manager back to tech, becoming a staff-plus engineer and creating a staff-plus-friendly company. She presented "A CTO That Still Codes: My Tortuous Path to the Staff Plus Engineer Role" at QCon London 2022.

Case Study

Bridging the Understanding Gap between Business and IT

Good alignment between business and IT is crucial if you want to make sure the technology supports the company's strategy as well as it possibly can. New tech — while often exciting — isn't exactly cheap. If it doesn't help you reach your business goals, what's the point of even investing in it at all?.

The scenario outlined above can happen when business and IT aren't properly aligned. Sometimes software developers create an application or system according to an outlined specification but, for some reason, the solution doesn't work as well as managers hoped it would. This is often because a crucial piece of information wasn't properly highlighted.

According to a report by Dynatrace, 49% of CIOs believe that a situation when business and IT teams work in separate "silos" is the biggest blocker for digital transformation. Long story short, it's important to strengthen the cooperation between teams—and remember that the IT department should be seen as a business partner instead of a "vendor". Better communication and cooperation between business managers and the IT department results in software solutions that fit the needs of the company more effectively.

These are the guidelines you should follow to keep a healthy IT-business alignment in your company:

1. Focus on the relationship—build a healthy relationship between the IT department and other teams.
2. Avoid stereotypes—neither side should use hurtful stereotypes.
3. Focus on requirements—define requirements in a clear and logical way, and focus on implementing them.
4. Choose the right team and communication style—find the right people and consider how you want to organize communication between the teams.
5. Involve developers at an early stage—make sure your IT specialists are involved early to avoid simple mistakes.
6. Concentrate on fast feedback—better access to customers smooths the flow of development.
7. Avoid changing fundamental requirements—explain to the business people what can and can’t be changed easily.
8. Use Agile methodology—consider the Agile approach, as it helps achieve goals easier and faster.
9. Encourage investment in new technologies—help business people overcome the fear of new technologies. Remind them it's a long-term investment and not something that brings profit in the short term.
10. Share technological advice—share your technical knowledge with the business side every time you think it can benefit them.

This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Marcin Gosiewski,"Bridging the Understanding Gap between Business and IT".

To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "architecture and design", "leadership", and "team collaboration" on InfoQ.

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