Following on from the last post, I came across (courtesy of Nick @ Toast Technology) an InfoQ article about the "partitioned, iterative" approach to EA.
Following the breadcrumbs to Roger Sessions’ piece on the topic (PDF version here), I was pleased to see that the way I’ve approached the provision of software functionality for years actually has a name. When I tagged it for del.icio.us, I made the note that it might be "Agile for architects", and certainly the point about enterprise agility is something that Sessions plays up in the paper. Of particular note to me was that more traditional approaches to enterprise architecture were more suited to object-oriented designs (and grew out of that movement), where the partitioned, iterative model is well-suited to SOA.
My favourite take-away from it: that for so long we have been trying to create enterprise architectures to be like structural blueprints – with every detail complete; we should be looking at a more coarse-grained "city plan" for our EA, and leave the blueprints for the more fine-grained activity of business process and software assembly.
An aside: both these last two posts have been based on material from the MSDN community … nice to know my biases aren’t blinding me 😉
Technorati Tags: architecture agile partitioned_iterative
