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Incrementally Designing Architecture

Last post 05:57 am December 16, 2015 by Ian Mitchell
5 replies
Aleksandr Chistiakov
07:23 am December 14, 2015

Hello everyone!

I am sure a lot of scrum.org readers have a great experience with the Incremental Design. And I hope that you can share with me your answer for that question: How to be if I need to change the Architecture, but new changes will not compatible with the primary version. It means that I need change all old classes usages, or create the addition logic for the compatibility, when I leave both old and new version? May be I don't know other opportunities.

That topic I've created while reading the great book: "The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore and Shane Warden

Ian Mitchell
12:25 pm December 14, 2015

If there were problems when revising the architecture, how would you know? Some problems might break the build, but others might be run-time incompatibilities. Is there an automated test harness which would then fail?

Aleksandr Chistiakov
06:42 am December 15, 2015

It's very simple we change BaseClass with a lots of dependencies and after that compilation of the project will be broken. And to fix that I have to change the every depending class. And unfortunately for all this work I need more time then 1 sprint. Maybe you know, how to be in that case?

Ian Mitchell
11:05 am December 15, 2015

It sounds like you need to gradually refactor the code using better design patterns. I'd suggest using a wrapper class and maybe dependency injection, for example. The wrapper would become the base class. It would support the old brittle contract, and also a new one that is better decoupled or encapsulated. Then you gradually wean the dependent classes away from their brittle relationships by refactoring a few of them each sprint.

I'm sure I've read something by Martin Fowler about this approach. In any case I'd google for his programming patterns as they are a good source of ideas.

Note that this will only address build dependencies. If you don't have an automated test harness in place, you can still get run-time errors, even with judicious refactoring.

Aleksandr Chistiakov
05:39 am December 16, 2015

Hi Ian!

Thanks a lot for advices. And can you give some tips for scrum master in that case. Should I learn different coding approaches and show it to my team or I appear the problem to the team(too much refactoring in one sprint) and they should solve it?

Ian Mitchell
05:57 am December 16, 2015

You should take this matter to the team so they can solve it, and help them. A Scrum Master should demonstrate servant-leadership.

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