Building Evolutionary Architectures, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Engineering Incremental Change

In 2010, Jez Humble and Dave Farley released Continuous Delivery, a collection of practices to enhance engineering efficiency in software projects. They provided the mechanism for building and releasing software via automation and tools but not the structure of how to design evolvable software. Evolutionary architecture assumes these engineering practices as being prerequisites but addresses how to utilize them to help design evolvable software.

Our definition of evolutionary architecture is one that supports guided, incremental change across multiple dimensions. By incremental change, we mean the architecture should facilitate change through a series of small changes. This chapter describes architectures that support incremental change along with some of the engineering practices used to achieve incremental change, an important building block of evolutionary architecture. We discuss two aspects of incremental change: development, which covers how developers build software, and operational, which covers how teams deploy software.

This chapter covers the characteristics, engineering practices, team considerations, and other aspects of building architectures that support incremental change.

Incremental Change

Here is an example of the operational side of incremental change. We start with the fleshed-out example of incremental change from Chapter 1, which includes additional details about the architecture and deployment environment. PenultimateWidgets, ...