Facilitating Software Architecture

Part II. Nurturing and Evolving Your Culture of Decentralized Trust

In Part I, you learned about combining the architecture advice process with ADRs to form the basis of a collective practice of architecture. In Part II, we’ll take this a step further by looking at the elements that can support your decentralized architectural deciding by nurturing and evolving your culture of trust.

Chapter 7 begins by taking a step back, exploring how power centers and governance are reset when the advice process is introduced. It considers where accountability for decisions moves (to the decision initiator and taker) and how the space it opens up for a culture of trust to develop needs to be consciously protected.

But how? With one or more optional supporting elements. In the remaining chapters of Part II, I describe a number of these supporting elements. Each of them acknowledges a particular systemic need you might be experiencing. As with the architecture advice process and ADRs, these supporting elements are deceptively simple, and the chapters that present them incorporate discussion about what they might contain and how they might land, fit, evolve, and potentially become redundant.

Chapter 8 introduces the first supporting element, which flips standard architectural sign-off meetings into an architecture advice forum: a focused space for conversations, advice, transparency, trust building, and group and organizational learning.

Chapter 9 then shines a light on a pair of areas frequently ...