This week Devin Hedge joins Dave Prior for another student question. This time about architecture and if the complexity of it would be better served by a waterfall approach:

The Question:

"How to plan for the Architecture effectively. With waterfall, we try to figure out all aspects of the business and the technical solution in advance before we start development. In Agile, we discover as we go. It's very likely that when we come to a certain, we'll find either the current business logic or the current technical framework cannot adapt our upcoming demands. There's a high opportunity that we'll need to destroy all the work that we've done. Talking in this perspective, isn't waterfall better than Agile?"

Show Notes

00:08 Interview Begins
00:51 This week’s question
02:00 What do we mean by architecture
02:29 The design principles and standards you need in place to support your work
03:35 If it isn’t loosely coupled, neither waterfall or agile can really help
04:17 Challenging the assumption that big up front planning could help you eliminate the risk of having to do rework and whether or not waterfall is actually supposed to do that
07:43 If we can’t eliminate the risk of not knowing everything up front, what can you do?
08:30 Devin puts on his architect hat - guardrails and guideposts
09:53 Reframing the problem
10:40 How physical building architects are still designing even after the building is built - you never know what the tenants of the building will actually want
11:48 The risk of making decisions too early
12:18 Advice from Devin on how to reduce your risk of designing architecture up front and put up the guardrails and guideposts you need
14:14 How architects look at the work and decision making
17:02 Making decisions at the last possible responsible moment
17:43 Having a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset
19:10 Is there value in waiting to make your decisions until you have all the information? What is your cost of delay of waiting to make the decisions?
20:57 Devin’s upcoming events: Agile Budgeting and Cost Tracking for the PMI North Carolina Chapter on July 11 and PMI South Carolina on July 20
21:57 How to get in touch with Devin
22:47 Interview Ends

Links from the podcast


Does Agile addresses the 25 point Federal IT Reformation plan? (June 29)
PMI Washington DC
http://conta.cc/2sov4vn

Agile: Budgeting for Agile Financial cost planning/tracking (July 11)
PMI North Carolina
http://bit.ly/2tmVMZz

Jeff Bezos Memo about Cloud Services
http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/


Contacting Devin

LeadingAgile: www.leadingagile.com/guides/devin-hedge/
Twitter: twitter.com/agiledevin
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/devinhedge

Contacting Dave

LeadingAgile: www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com
Twitter: twitter.com/mrsungo
Personal Blog: drunkenpm.net

LeadingAgile CSM & CSPO Classes

For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class.

Feedback/Questions

If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com