Chapter 15 - Architectures in Agile Projects

Question 1

4 tenants of the agile manifesto

Answer 1

individuals and interactions over processes and tools

working software over comprehensive documentation

customer collaboration over contract negotiation

responding to change over following a plan

Question 2

What kind of projects is Agile not well suited for?

Answer 2

larger projects with distributed development or whose processes need to be certifiable

Question 3

2 activities that add the most additional time to a project

Answer 3

• up-front design on the architecture

- rework due to fixing defects and addressing modifications

Question 4

whats the relationship between up-front design and rework time?

Answer 4

more time spent doing upfront design reduces the rework that needs to be done

Question 5

Why do we just do as much up-front design as possible so that we have essentially zero rework?

Answer 5

at a certain point, additional up-front work adds additional time to the project schedule because it doesn’t reduce rework by very much.

There’s an optimal amount of rework that yields the shortest project schedule

Question 6

what is top-down mode

Answer 6

designing and analyzing architectural structures to meet the demanding quality attribute requirements

Question 7

what is bottom up mode

Answer 7

analyzing a wide array of implementation-specific and environment-specific constraints and fashioning solutions to them

Question 8

what is a spike?

Answer 8

a experiment in which we try out some feature to see if plausibility

Question 9

Agile processes are a response to 4 project needs

Answer 9

• to be more responsive to stakeholders
• to be quicker to develop functionality that users care about
• to show more and earlier progress in a project’s life cycle
• to be less burdened by documenting aspects of a project that would change

Question 10

Advice for large systems with well understood requirements?

Answer 10

doing a large amount of architecture work up front will pay off

Question 11

Advice for large projects with uncertain requirements?

Answer 11

quickly design a candidate architecture even if it leaves out details. Refine this architecture as circumstances dictate.

Question 12

Advice for small projects with uncertain requirements

Answer 12

try to get agreement on the major patterns to be employed. Don’t spend too much time on up-front design