Thursday, August 30, 2007 10:14 AM
I am in the new position of Software Architect at a Federal bank. I am lucky that the bank is on its third year of embracing the agile practices that I have come to know and enjoy. It has been a real pleasure working with these agile individuals.
One of the benefits of being in an agile culture is that they push me to step up my game and take it to the next level. With that in mind I have been thinking about how I can become a better agile architect. At first blush this seemed to be a contradiction to me, as I think any position does when first forced to reconcile its behavior to the Agile way. With the concept that its all about changing my point of view I set about thinking how I could embrace this the best way possible.
One of the areas that seemed like it might be ripe for supporting material is in the agile data reading. Most database developers also seem to struggle with the agile concept. Sure enough I found the home run quote that I will use when ever I am trying to figure out how to perform my job in an agile fashion. I found it while reading the Dec 2005 Cutter IT Journal:.
...you create initial, high-level models at the beginning of a project, models that overview the scope of the problem domain you are addressing as well as a potential architecture to build to.
One thing that I am thinking this process is going to require is me doing a lot of work in the teams iteration 0 or maybe even in the teams iteration -1. I am not sure how I am going to best handle this as this could be very hard to organize but that's not going to stop me from trying.