Accidental Architecture

I’m not sure if it’s ironic or fitting that my very first post on Form Follows Function, “Like it or not, you have an architecture (in fact, you may have several)”, dealt with the concept of accidental architecture. A blog dedicated to software and solution architecture starts off by discussing the fact that architecture exists even in the absence of intentional design? It is, however, a theme that seems to recur.

The latest recurrence was a Twitter exchange with Ruth Malan, in which she stated:

Design is the act and the outcome. We design a system. The system has a design.

This prompted Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz to observe that architecture need not be intentional and “…even areas you neglect well [sic] have design and then you’d have to deal with its implications”. To this I added “accidental architecture is still architecture – whether it’s good architecture or not is another thing”.

Ruth closed with a reference to a passage by Grady Booch:

Every software-intensive system has an architecture. In some cases that architecture is intentional, while in others it is accidental. Most of the time it is both, born of the consequences of a myriad of design decisions made by its architects and its developers over the lifetime of a system, from its inception through its evolution.

The idea that an architecture can “emerge” out of skillful construction rather than as a result of purposeful design, is trivially true. The “Big Ball of Mud”, an ad hoc arrangement of code that grows organically, remains a popular design pattern (yes, it’s a pattern rather than an anti-pattern – see the Introduction of “Big Ball of Mud” for an explanation of why). What remains in question is how effective is an architecture that largely or even entirely “emerges”.

Even the current architectural style of the day, microservices, can fall prey to the Big Ball of Mud syndrome. A plethora of small service applications developed without a unifying vision of how they will make up a coherent whole can easily turn muddy (if not already born muddy). The tagline of Simon Brown’s “Distributed big balls of mud” sums it up: “If you can’t build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer?”.

Someone building a house using this theory might purchase the finest of building materials and fixtures. They might construct and finish each room with the greatest of care. If, however, the bathroom is built opening into the dining room and kitchen, some might question the design. Software, solution, and even enterprise IT architectures exist as systems of systems. The execution of a system’s components is extremely important, but you cannot ignore the context of the larger ecosystem in which those components will exist.

Too much design up front, architects attempting to make decisions below the level of granularity for which they have sufficient information, is obviously wrong. It’s like attempting to drive while blindfolded using only a GPS. By the same token, jumping in the car and driving without any idea of a destination beyond what’s at the end of your hood is unlikely to be successful either. Finding a workable balance between the two seems to be the optimal solution.

[Shanty Town Image by Otsogey via Wikimedia Commons.]