13Weaving architecture back in
Architecture at every level of the loop, with an explicit owner.
Part III
Recovering the essence
Part II described a reinforcing loop. Part III looks at the levers that break it: architecture with an owner, Scrum applied where it is said not to work, and a recovery that starts below the waterline.
Architecture does not need to return as a big upfront phase. It needs a place at every level of the loop, and someone accountable for it. Scrum-in-name-only teams usually give it neither.
The guiding principle is to make architecture risk-driven and continuous: just enough, and just ahead of need. George Fairbanks develops the risk-driven approach in Just Enough Software Architecture. The amount of design effort follows the amount of technical risk, and it is spread across the life of the product instead of concentrated at the start or left to chance.
| Level | Role of architecture | Practices |
|---|---|---|
| Product horizon | Intent | A lightweight architecture vision tied to the Product Goal: context and container views, key quality attributes, main technical bets. A technical roadmap kept alongside the product roadmap, as a forecast. |
| Start of the product | Proof | A walking skeleton (Alistair Cockburn): a thin end-to-end slice through the main components and the deployment pipeline. It is a working increment and a proof of architecture at once. |
| Backlog and refinement | Runway | Explicit enablers ordered by risk and by the features that depend on them, one to three sprints ahead. A standing refinement question: does this item have architectural impact? Spikes scheduled the sprint before the feature they de-risk. |
| Sprint | Discipline | A Definition of Done that includes refactoring, automated tests and updated architecture decision records. Architectural fitness functions in continuous integration. Sprint Goals that may be architectural or mixed. |
| Inspection points | Visibility | Technical health and the main technical risks shown in the Sprint Review. Technical debt kept as visible backlog items, with its trend discussed in the retrospective. |
Table 5 · Architecture at every level of the loop. Each level corresponds to a layer of the planning onion in Figure 3.
Two practices worth singling out
Prove the hard path first. For each significant epic, choose as the first slice the one that exercises the riskiest integration or the most demanding quality attribute, not the one that makes the best demo. It applies Cohn's rule of doing high-value, high-risk work early to architecture.
Turn intentions into checks. Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua describe fitness functions in Building Evolutionary Architectures: automated tests of architectural properties such as dependency rules, performance thresholds or security constraints. They run on every build and turn architecture from a document into something verified continuously.
An explicit owner
Part I identified technical coherence as the accountability the Scrum Guide leaves unnamed. Three arrangements work in practice:
- A hands-on architect inside the team, writing code and taking part in refinement, rather than reviewing from outside.
- An Architecture Owner, a role defined by Disciplined Agile, working as a pair with the Product Owner when the backlog is ordered. The Product Owner owns value, the Architecture Owner owns technical sustainability, and the two negotiate the order openly instead of features winning by default.
- A regular cross-team architecture forum when several teams share components, to manage interfaces and dependencies.
Capacity: a floor, then risk
Claude Aubry's guideline of about a quarter of the early sprints' effort is a sound starting point. To keep it from eroding, treat it as a floor that is not renegotiated every sprint. Above that floor, size architectural work by current risk: high at the start of a product and after a major change of direction, lower on a stable product. Ongoing quality work belongs in the Definition of Done, where it is not prioritised against features at all.
Section takeaways
- Architecture belongs at every level: intent for the product, a walking skeleton at the start, runway in the backlog, discipline in the Definition of Done and visibility in reviews.
- Technical coherence needs a named owner who negotiates backlog order with the Product Owner.
- Protect design time with a floor that is not renegotiated, then size the rest by risk.