The deconstruction of architecture in times of crisis

Tight deadlines, budgets on a strict diet, exploding metrics KLOC, CC, RFC, nebulas of technologies, paradigms, and manifestos. Distributed teams, „nonsense” large and complex systems.

In the times of global financial crisis, are we also witnessing (and can also be culprits), the crisis in our industry? Crisis, which has a much further forward consequences.

During the presentation we will try to understand what is a crisis of architecture, what are its sources and consequences. We will try to see beyond our „garden” and seek solutions using „systems thinking” and „complexity theory”. We will look at the archetypes of systems, and will try to understand what characterises „complex systems” and hopefully will propose solutions to the problems we are facing today. Instead of the reading lines of code, trying to understand the intentions of the author, we can improve our system, by understanding its structure and interactions between components. We will take a look at „systems” outside of software development world and will find many similarities. Why resilient, self-organizing and hierarchical systems are most common and stable systems in an outside world. What we can learn from it?

Maybe instead of studying programming languages, platforms and architecture styles and patterns we should focus on understanding how systems work in general? Understand nature of systems and their complexity.