How would you navigate conflicting opinions on software architecture decisions within your team?

Regularly hold code review sessions and design discussions where the people who are working on your software can present and defend their viewpoints. Encourage open dialogue: Foster a culture of open dialogue and respect for differing opinions by ensuring team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas.

You need to set the tone for an open session. In that session , it is all about explaining one’s thought process with being judge or subjected to perception bias. Ask each member to explain their understanding of the baseline requirements and their interpretation of a successful deployment. Then start the listening session, so that people are aware of the environment and objective

In today’s world business people make architecture decisions not technical people. It’s about the cost and ROI. So while you may want to have pair programming and multiple rounds of reviews and 4 week Sprints, more than likely, that is not going to fly with the suits. My recommendation is to support your POV with facts and data, and include how your architecture choices will lower their cost of doing business. Lightweight tends to win these days. Remote Procedure Calls and SOAP lost out to REST because REST is simple and fast. Now, this may not be true in a heavily regulated industry, like finance, or government, or nuclear software, but it has been completely true in every private business I’ve worked in outside those areas.

An architectural approach follows certain design guidelines. A customers requirements can be meet in several ways. The tabulation of a team member’s understanding of the requirements based on their interpretation provides a rough guideline to the process. Commonalities need to be understood, appreciated and sometimes challenged(to spark creativity). Differences need to tabulated and explored theoretically to see the end result if we follow a path.

1. Doing a comparative analysis in terms of provided features like scaleability, concurrency, performance, integration and HA of each proposed system. 2. Architectural compatibility with existing as-is processes, their all features and any need of revamping processes and efforts and cost required.

Once we explore the different paths of architectural workflows used, some paths will return non-optimised results. They are discarded. The the process of choosing the “best path” starts with criteria of - must have, good to have, nice to have and love to have. This outlays the alternatives we have for the given project.

Once we explore the different paths of architectural workflows used, some paths will return non-optimised results. They are discarded. The the process of choosing the “best path” starts with criteria of - must have, good to have, nice to have and love to have. This outlays the alternatives we have for the given project.

Each Architectural path is drawn out in terms of representative diagrams. Then there is a listening session again on the merits of a path subjective to the criteria set in the earlier step. The objective is to reach a consensus, which might please everyone and acknowledged that it is the best path for everyone. The key take away is an architectural path with a backup path having consensus in the team to move forward.