200 OK SwatantrAI

Every decision we make for our projects, be it technology, process or people related, can be a viewed as a form of investment. Investments come associated with a cost, which may or may not be monetary, and carry trust that they will eventually pay off. Our employers choose to offer us salaries in the hope that this investment will positively affect the outcome of their venture. We decide to follow a specific development methodology in the hope that it will make the team more productive. We choose to spend a month redesigning the physical architecture of an application in the belief that it will be beneficial in the long run.

One of the ways of measuring the success of investments is by rate of return, also known as return on investment (ROI). For example, “we anticipate that by spending more time writing tests we will have less bugs in our next production release”. The cost of the investment in this case is derived from the time spent writing tests. What we gain is the time saved from fixing bugs in the future, plus the satisfied customers experiencing better behaved software. Let’s assume that currently 10 out of 40 working hours in a week are spent fixing bugs. We estimate that by devoting 4 hours a week to testing we will reduce the amount of time spent on fixing bugs to 2 a week, effectively saving 8 hours to invest in something else. The anticipated ROI is 200%, equal to the 8 hours we save from bug fixing divided by the 4 hours we invest in testing.

Not everything need directly translate in monetary gains, but our investments should result in added value. If for our current project, time to market is essential to the stakeholders, maybe a bulletproof architecture which requires a lengthy up front design phase will not offer ROI as interesting as a swift alpha release. By quickly going live, we gain the ability to adapt to audience reactions that can form the deciding element to the future direction and success of the project, whereas not thoroughly planning can incur the cost of not being able to scale the application easily enough when the need arises. The ROI of each option can be determined by examining its costs and projected profits and can be used as a base for selection between what is available.

Consider thinking of architectural decisions as investments and take into account the associated rate of return, it is a useful approach for finding out how pragmatic or fit for purpose every option on the table is.

As an architect, it’s tempting to create elaborate designs and abstractions that elegantly address the problem at hand. It is even more tempting to sprinkle new technologies into the project. At the end of the day, someone has to implement your design, and the architectural acrobatics that you have the developers perform impact the project.

When designing the architecture for your project, you need to have a feel for the amount of effort necessary to implement each element of your design – if you developed an element before it will much easer to estimate the effort required.

Don‘t use a pattern in your design that you haven‘t personally implemented before. Don‘t rely on a framework that you haven‘t coded against before. Don‘t use a server that you haven‘t configured before. If your architecture depends on design elements that you haven‘t personally used, there are a number of negative side effects:

1. You will not have experienced the learning curve that your developers will have to face. If you don’t know how long it takes to learn a new technology, you won’t be able to give a good estimate on time to implement.
2. You will not know the pitfalls to avoid when using the elements. Inevitably, things will not go as well as the demo that the trained expert in the technology provided. If you haven’t worked with the technology before, you will be blindsided when this happens.
3. You will lose the confidence of your developers. When the developers ask questions about the design and you aren’t able to give solid answers, they will quickly lose confidence in you and your design.
4. You will introduce unnecessary risk. Not knowing these things can put a big question mark on key elements of the solution. No one wants to start a project with big, unnecessary risks hanging around.

So how does one go about learning new frameworks, patterns, and server platforms? Well that‘s another axiom in and of itself: Before anything, an architect is a developer.