What do you do if your entrepreneurial venture lacks a sustainable and long-lasting system architecture?

1 What is system architecture?

System architecture is the design and organization of the components and interactions that make up your system, such as hardware, software, data, networks, users, and external systems. It defines the structure, behavior, functionality, quality, and constraints of your system. A good system architecture should align with your business goals, user needs, and technical requirements, and should be able to evolve and adapt to changing conditions.

3 How to assess your system architecture?

To improve your system architecture, you must assess its current state and identify its strengths and weaknesses. Several methods and tools can be used for this purpose, such as conducting formal or informal reviews of your system architecture with stakeholders, measuring and quantifying various aspects of your system architecture, comparing it to existing or best practices, and using software tools to analyze, visualize, or simulate your system architecture. Criteria for reviews may include functionality, usability, performance, scalability, security, modularity, maintainability, and documentation. Metrics may include complexity, cohesion, coupling, modularity, reuse, testability, and technical debt. Examples of patterns may include microservices, serverless, event-driven or cloud-native architectures. Examples of tools may include UML diagrams, architecture description languages or architecture frameworks.

4 How to improve your system architecture?

Once you have assessed your system architecture, you can take steps to improve it based on your findings and priorities. Various strategies and techniques can be employed to enhance your system architecture, such as refactoring, evolution, and governance. Refactoring involves modifying or restructuring the architecture to improve its quality without changing its functionality. Evolution means adapting or extending the architecture to accommodate new or changing requirements, functionality, or technology. Governance establishes and enforces rules and standards for the system architecture, to ensure consistency, alignment, and compliance. For instance, you can define and document your architecture principles, policies, and processes. You can also use architecture review boards, audits, or tools to monitor and control architecture decisions and changes.

5 How to maintain your system architecture?

Maintaining a system architecture is an ongoing process that requires attention and effort. You can use various practices and principles to sustain your system architecture, such as documenting and updating it, testing and verifying it, and collecting feedback from users, customers, or stakeholders. For example, you can use diagrams, models, or narratives to describe the architecture views and perspectives, unit or integration tests to check functionality and performance, surveys or interviews to gather feedback, and metrics or logs to monitor the architecture performance. This will help you ensure that your system architecture is relevant, effective, and efficient.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?