Thread by @yonkeltron

I love when people can't tell the difference between a quick architecture discussion and Big Design Up Front (BDUF). Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning. A little prep for a development effort goes a long way!

I think that, largely, folks like to hate on architecture because the BDUF they normally have seen is very anti-agile in that it doesn't actually increase agility.

What I'm suggesting is that incremental architecture discussions coming before development can be a huge help. Just keep having them before you iterate and do JUST ENOUGH to get you across the goal line sensibly.

The best projects I've worked on have actually included product stakeholders in these architecture discussions and factored in direct customer feedback. It's amazing what you can do with a little input.

I have little or no sympathy for folks looking to crap all over thoughtful development practices in the name of #scrum or some other dogmatic "Agile framework" for its own sake.

I really like and respect the work of @hillelogram because it takes formal methods and applies them iteratively to avoid BDUF but gain the benefits of a little bit of planning.

Both @hillelogram I have been in various discussions and have thrown around the terms Agile Modeling with Test Driven Architecture to describe this. Iteratively growing specifications in response to changing requirements JIT before development starts.

So far, it works pretty well and I'm excited to try it out more. Although @hillelogram is an advocate of TLA+ he also knows Alloy pretty well, so there are a variety of tools at our disposal. Working with him has been a blast!