Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most famous American [building] architects of all time, worked on over 500 structures and left a few notes of wisdom for us to consider. While the comparison between software and building architecture breaks down pretty quickly, the quotes below apply to both disciplines.

1. A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.
2. All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable.
3. An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
4. Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
5. Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
6. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
7. Less is only more where more is no good.
8. The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.
9. The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.
10. The truth is more important than the facts.
11. "Think simple" as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

Constantin K.
Firebrand Architect™
www.SoftwareArchitectures.com

Control Your Engine!

Imagine you’re building a car. You get car parts, including an engine, from various vendors [think COTS software] and different people help you put it together along the way [think contractors & subject matter experts across divisions]. You’re making progress – you have attached the wheels and can push the car through the product line [dev / test]. Now you’re reached the end of the product line. It’s time to start the engine and drive [pilot stage]. The engine turns but doesn’t start. After troubleshooting and double checking your work you find out that the engine [think messaging infrastructure] doesn’t work. The fuel tank is full [messages are sent from originator], the fuel line to the engine is full [message path is traceable], but the engine won’t process the fuel. When you ask for help from the engine integrators they blame the fuel line.

The engine is the mechanism that makes a car move in a similar way that a messaging platform makes software components work together.

The point of the analogy is to remind architects that in the environments where they are constrained by organization’s enterprise architecture the communication patterns and related infrastructure that glues their application may already be predefined. No matter how good the infrastructure products may be, blindly assuming that the people operating the infrastructure are able to configure it for your needs is a recipe for disaster. This is especially true for quality attributes of a system that require high volume of transactions.

In environments where you cannot control the communication infrastructure always design with a backup in mind.

Firebrand Architect on duty: CK