This guest blog is written by Jean-Marie Zirano, Chief Marketing Officer at Axellience.
Isn’t it time that IS architects benefited from the agility and DevOps culture that the digital era offers? Why are so many architects waiving their right to agility?
It may be simply because these select architects ignore the solutions which exist to allow them to be agile. Yet there is hope – Axellience Agile Architecture Factory™ is a simple and collaborative solution which signals the end of bureaucratic, document-centric and cumbersome software for business and IT architects involved in enterprise digital transformation. To add a cherry on top, it integrates with Atlassian’s flagship products Jira and Confluence, solutions offered by Valiantys.
By avoiding these 7 deadly sins, the IS architect can become agile.
Pride
Is it because of pride that the IS architect gives up integrating architecture principles and activities into agile developments, hence isolating himself? Is deflecting collaboration a means to preserve power? Unfortunately, the first tangible effect of doing so is a significantly slower software lifecycle and delivery.
How to repent?
Share your vision by being at the right place at the right time in the software lifecycle; architecture models are documented, versioned and updated thanks to the two-way integration between Axellience Agile Architecture Factory™ and Confluence.
Greed (with time)
Wrongly thinking it saves time to not keep the DevOps teams waiting, the architect exits the software lifecycle. He believes architecture activities must take time in order to gain credibility.
How to repent?
The value of agile architecture is proportional to its small footprint on the project organization. A Jira ticket, 4-5 architecture model tunings and developers can move ahead, focusing only on the necessary changes which are perfectly scoped and tracked in order to produce a new release. Architecture models are hence documented and versioned on the fly and kept up-to-date in Confluence, giving way to full visibility.
Isolation
Worsening the software production chain’s agility, the architect who avoids collaboration is limited to implementing irrelevant architecture rules based on heavy, abstruse and obsolete frameworks. From the top of his ivory tower, the architect only watches the production lines.
How to repent?
Go down to the shop floor! Participate in the software lifecycle but with agile tools and processes that integrate architecture and projects into a global view. The Jira + Confluence + Agile Architecture Factory™ combination stems from these principles.
Procrastination
Architects sleep better at night when the IS documentation is updated and correct. Yet there is a problem if, long after the deployments occurred, architects are running after DevOps teams and project managers for mapping. This approach causes mistakes and errors due to an asynchronous documentation process.
How to repent?
Integrate the documentation into the software lifecycle instead of keeping it apart, as the latter causes it to be both wrong and late. The two-way integration of Confluence with Agile Architecture Factory™ was built exactly for this.
Inconsistency
A well trained architect always spots and criticizes IS inconsistencies. However if he isn’t playing the agility and DevOps game, the same IS architect shoots himself in the foot, as he lets inconsistencies increase, which leads to side effects such as a weak reuse rate of components and patterns, topped-off with the proliferation of a disjointed and untraceable documentation.
How to repent?
Jump back in the enterprise software lifecycle and housekeeping processes, for both legacy and new projects. As long as architecture dependencies are under control, any component change won’t bring regressions and bad surprises, and reuse becomes an easy best practice. Such dependencies are available from 3 viewpoints:
- From Confluence: Document-driven vision of architecture models versions
- From Jira: Requirement, change requests, impact analysis and bidirectional links with architecture models
- From Agile Architecture Factory™: integrated vision of IS architecture, components, dependencies and linked requirements.
Tunnel vision
The architect ensures the inevitable loss over the global vision of the IS if he doesn’t have an actual IS map, nor the ability to compare the current and future state and no means to anticipate or plan changes. He won’t be able to attach Jira tickets to models nor document required changes in Confluence.
How to repent?
Look at the whole picture. Agile Architecture Factory™ has easy version management features which automatically syncs with Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence.
Rigidness
By not adopting architecture best practices and letting DevOps teams work alone – presumably at an agile pace – the architect will eventually slow down the entire production chain and lower its quality. This chain can only go as fast as its slowest link.
How to repent?
Be flexible! Agility requires flexibility, and above all else a never ending dialog. Agile Architecture Factory™ is natively collaborative, and so are Jira and Confluence. The two-way integration between these tools gives total flexibility to the architecture teams and allows them to collaborate with DevOps teams, allowing architects to prove their value in an agile process.
Are you an agile architect?
Axellience Agile Architecture Factory™ absolves you from the above 7 deadly sins and leads you straight into the agile generation, boosted by its two-way integration with Atlassian Jira and Confluence.
The solution provides architects with a simple, innovative and collaborative online modeling environment, spanning from journey mapping to business and IT component design. Axellience Agile Architecture Factory™ supports standards such as BPMN, DMN, Archimate and UML. It ensures agile architecture best practices with no trade off on the quality of processes, deliverables and architecture components.
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