revolutionary in an evolutionary world

This article is a follow-up to cost-value entanglement. Product management is notorious for being risk averse. This often comes from a history of dealing with frequent failures to deliver on time and with quality due to chronic cost-value entanglement. This initial architectural failure cripples a product forever, unless the root cause of the problem is recognized and corrected. Risk aversion grows as the product becomes brittle, and development becomes unwieldy due to ever-increasing code complexity.

Architecture is often thought of as a design function, but this is far from accurate. Use case and requirements analysis are specification activities, which are central to product architecture. It is most important to identify how its users interact with the system and what functions a system performs. These aspects of the system should be encapsulated by its facade, the boundary between the externally visible behavior (interfaces) and its internal implementation. Poor product specification and poor separation between interface and implementation are the architectural manifestations of cost-value entanglement.

This leads to product management demanding a meticulous “evolutionary” approach to development, meaning only small patchwork enhancements are permitted. Significant redesign and technological improvements are impossible, because internal changes will disrupt the externally visible behavior, breaking things for the installed base of users. Such unreasonable constraints can be alleviated by disentangling the facade from the internals. Clearly identify the externally visible concepts in a precise model to support human understanding and interfaces for programmatic access. This enables evolving the facade independently of radical redesigns to the internal implementation. Without this flexibility, revolutionary change is impossible, if quality and time to market are to be maintained.

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