Neal Ford on evolutionary architecture

In the first episode of our new O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk about software architecture and the concept of “evolutionary architecture” with Neal Ford, director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy that focuses on end-to-end software development and delivery. Ford is presenting two sessions at OSCON 2017, O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, and he is a co-author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book Building Evolutionary Architectures.

Discussion points:

• Software architecture’s increasing popularity over the last few years; Ford says that “companies such as Netflix and Amazon showed that if you do software architecture really well, you build a competitive advantage over everybody else.”
• The non-functional requirements and soft skills needed to successfully implement software architecture.
• How evolutionary architecture enables you to adapt to the future rather than predict it; Ford notes the pitfalls of “trying to do predictive planning against an incredibly dynamic ecosystem.”
• Why guided change and incremental change are the two characteristics of an evolutionary architecture.
• The difference between evolutionary and adaptive systems.

I also talk with Ally MacDonald, O’Reilly editor and a program chair of O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference, June 19-22, 2017, in San Jose, California, about the topics of the event’s sessions and training courses.

Other links:

• Ted Neward’s presentation “Architectural Katas” at the 2016 O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference
• Aaron Bedra’s keynote on security at the 2017 O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference
• The video series Software Architecture Fundamentals Understanding The Basics and Software Architecture Fundamentals Beyond The Basics, by Neal Ford and Mark Richards
• OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, May 8-11, 2017, in Austin, Texas
• The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, October 16-18, 2017, in London