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- For the last 15 years there has been a steady march of the agile brigade, the philosophy is great, the people behind it are all awesome, they're great OO designers and thinkers and have written many awesome books on OO and UML that I still have on my bookshelf. An important point about the manifesto is that it doesn't say there should be no documentation. It's abut striking the right balance.
- Now whether you doing waterfall or Agile, architecture and design are activities that still need to be done. The question I keep hearing is "if we're adapting an agile approach can we develop the architecture and design of our systems in an agile way?" Well why not? It makes more sense to draft out an architecture, take it the client, seek early approval, make changes as needed and repeat this until you have an agreed architecture. Notice something about the question and answer, when we are talking about the architecture, at level are we speaking, software architecture, systems architecture, information architecture, or an enterprise architecture? All of these things can developed in an incremental manner.
- Since the early 2000s there has been a rise in the desire the build software using TDD. Now TDD is a practice that we can used within your Agile lifecycle. But it is cleary about the development of software, not the design of the infrastructure, the QoS attributes of a system as a whole, the security requirements, the evaluation of technologies required for the entire solution and their costs, it doesn't reveal data transformation issues and I could go on, the list is big. These are architectural and design issues that must be tackled early and refined on an ongoing basis. Once you have your architecture, TDD can be applied at the component level.