Architecture: The Absence of Self-Organisation
by Gerrit Beine
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
Hardly any other of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto is referenced as frequently as this one.
It makes self-organisation appear to be the key to good – the best – software architecture and many architects, coaches and managers look to self-organisation as the solution to the problems inherent in software development.
Yet architecture is the absence of any kind of self-organisation – in its most expressive form.
Even in software development.
This talk will explain why both perspectives are correct and how they are related.
It will become clear that self-organisation is both a solution and a problem for software development and what makes software architecture so special from the perspective of socio-technical systems.
And, of course, a few ideas will be shared on how to deal with this realisation in practice in order to design really good software architectures.
