Simon Brown lives in Jersey (the largest of the Channel Islands) and works as an independent consultant, helping teams to build better software. His client list spans over 20 countries and includes organisations ranging from small technology startups through to global household names. Simon is an award-winning speaker and the author of Software Architecture for Developers – a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility. He is sharing from his knowledge on coding the architecture blog. He still codes too.
In Simon Brown’s own words: “I believe that a lightweight approach to software architecture is pivotal to successfully delivering software, and that it can complement agile approaches rather than compete against them. After all, a good architecture enables agility.
In a nutshell, my lightweight approach to software architecture includes doing “just enough” up front design to understand the significant structural elements of the software, some lightweight sketches to communicate that vision to the team and ensuring that the highest priority risks are identified and mitigated. I use a technique that I call Risk-storming as a visual and collaborative way to identify those risks. The code doesn’t tell the whole story, so I deliver a lightweight software guidebook as supplementary documentation. Ensuring an alignment between the software architecture and the code can help massively too, yet the abstractions we draw on our diagrams rarely matches those in the code.”
We welcome Simon Brown to I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 in Bucharest and we’re looking forward for an awesome gathering.