Software Architecture: Buzzwords, Blunders, and Business Realities

As my career approaches nearly 20 years in the world of software development, a recurring thought nags at me—a persistent itch, if you will. It surfaces in meetings, casual conversations, during long-haul flights pondering all things software, or like recently, during a conference discussion. This reflection stems from years of experience, hearing the same buzzwords, and observing their often-predictable consequences—leading to a mismatch between software topology and business goals.

But enough about that. Let’s get to the point: Software Architecture. To set the tone, let’s borrow from a well-known comment which went viral almost ten years ago:

“Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”

Substitute "big data" with "software architecture," and the analogy remains strikingly apt.

Every software system has some architecture—intended or not. Even chaotic messes can be analysed, described, and represented as an architectural state (the same way a slum implicitly has an architecture of sorts). Yet, despite its ubiquity and importance, the essence of software architecture is often missing from conversations that invoke it.

What Is Software Architecture?

At its core, software architecture is a high-level blueprint—a description of a system’s visible parts, their interactions, and how they engage with external actors. Its ultimate purpose? To enable a business to achieve its goals by using software over time, aligned with its vision and strategy.

Importantly, architecture is not about rigid rules or pleasing diagrams. It’s about ensuring the system serves the business effectively, with the right level of detail conveyed to the right people in the organisation. Not everyone needs to understand every single aspect; over-communicating or under-communicating can both lead to diminishing returns in different situations. Furthermore, architecture doesn’t need to always prioritise maintainability or quality—those attributes depend on the business strategy.

Here’s where the cracks show. I’ve sat through countless debates among technologists arguing about the "correct" architecture, many of which were disconnected from the company’s vision and strategy.

In rare instances only, I’ve witnessed thoughtful discussions aligning architecture with business goals. I’d like to think I nudged a few of them in that direction myself. But more often, buzzwords win the day, and decisions are made without scrutiny, especially when developer time seems like an endless resource.

Case Studies in Misalignment

Case 1: The Bloated Startup

Once, I analysed a startup’s codebase spanning approximately 2 million lines of code across backend, web frontends, and mobile apps. This was only three years into the company’s journey.

The sheer complexity and volume of code were wildly out of sync with the startup’s business needs. The codebase was bloated and unscalable for a company still searching for product-market fit, let alone profitability. This over-ambitious architecture became a drag on the business, impeding evolution and growth when agility was most crucial.

Upon further scrutiny, it turned out that the source of such state, was no proper dialogue between the product team and the engineers. There was lack of mutual understanding, with the essence of the requests incoming from the business side getting lost in translation.

If the startup as a whole had focused on a simpler, leaner design and found a way to enforce it rigorously, it might have retained the agility to pivot quickly while conserving resources so essential in early-stage companies.

Case 2: Over-engineered Micro-services

Let’s assume you do the ground work and come to conclusion that the right architecture for the business are indeed micro-services. You adopt that micro-services architecture designed to resemble a system of LEGO blocks, establish autonomous teams, and align organisational structure to support them.

Even then, external shocks—like the COVID-19 pandemic—can disrupt everything. A system working beautifully with a swarm of teams supporting a well-designed micro-services architecture may suddenly need to operate with a much smaller group. If the revenue stream generated by those services was highly susceptible to external conditions, the company might have been better off starting with a modular monolith. A simpler architecture could have reduced maintenance overhead and been more resilient to sudden resource constraints or market shocks.

This highlights an important tradeoff: micro-services offer agility but introduce complexity and dependencies that may not be sustainable under all circumstances.

Case 3: The Commerce Misstep

A mid-sized e-commerce company implemented an event-driven architecture to process orders, hoping to scale effortlessly during peak sales periods like Black Friday. The architecture was technically impressive, leveraging message queues, event sourcing, and distributed databases.

However, the business underestimated its operational costs. The system’s complexity demanded highly specialised engineers, inflating hiring costs. Moreover, the company’s order volume remained stable outside peak seasons, leaving an over-engineered system idle for much of the year.

A simpler, synchronous approach with elastic scaling for high-demand periods might have saved significantly on both implementation and operational costs. The misalignment between the architecture and the company’s actual needs strained resources and delayed profitability.

Closing Thoughts

I could provide countless other examples illustrating how lack of foresight and refusal to align architecture with business goals translates into higher costs and waste. But, as always, striking that fragile balance is everything. There’s no simple formula other than engaging in conversations with the broader team to try to make that prediction about the future that the architecture desperately needs as input.

The interplay between business goals and software architecture is nuanced and ever-changing. Rather than yielding entirely to current business needs, architecture must work in concert with business goals. It’s a conversation—a continuous process of evaluating tradeoffs like cost, reliability, and scalability against strategic objectives.

Software architecture is more than a technical discipline—it’s a bridge between technology and business. When approached thoughtfully and collaboratively, it can guide a company toward sustainable growth. When misunderstood, it can lead to inefficiency, misalignment, and technical debt that suffocates innovation.

So, the next time you hear the term "architecture" thrown around, ask yourself: Does the proposed setup support the business in a way that justifies its cost and complexity? Because at the end of the day, that’s what architecture is really about.