Let's continue the topic with architectural debt. The previous post was focused on the impact and importance of the debt itself, but it has no information about what to do with it.
To fix that I suggest to read Technical Debt vs. Architecture Debt: Don’t Confuse Them. The article maybe not fully answer this question but provide actionable recommendations of how to measure the architectural debt and what strategies can be applied to decrease it.
Architectural debt indicators:
🔸 Duplicated functionality: Count how many systems perform overlapping functions.
🔸 Integration complexity: Measure the number of point-to-point connections vs API gateways, enterprise service buses (ESBs) or event-driven models.
🔸 Principle violations: Track how many systems lack defined owners, documented interfaces or compliance with internal architectural standards.
🔸 Latency chains: Calculate end-to-end data flow time between multiple hops.
🔸 Configuration management completeness: Measure the percentage of applications with filled ownership, life cycle and dependency fields.
What can be done:
🔸 Officially define architecture debt. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting it. :)
🔸 Build metrics and dashboards.
🔸 Practice architecture observability. Track system dependencies, integration bottlenecks and principal compliance in near-real time.
🔸 Run architecture reviews.
🔸 Manage debt as a portfolio. Not all debt needs immediate repayment. Like managing a project portfolio, organizations should prioritize the debt by business impact.
🔸 Link debt to business KPIs.
As you can see there is no rocket science: standard
make the problem evident -> measure -> improve cycle. I think the article is a good point to start analyze whether you have architectural debt in your organization and prepare first steps to work with it.
#architecture