Architecting while Agile? Yes, you can.

f you’d been in one of my trainings a while ago, you’d have heard someone ask me this question. “You Agile evangelists are always talking about these new roles: Product Owner. Development Team. Release Train Engineer. This, that and the other. Fine and good — but where does my work fit in? I’m an architect. And I can see my role is changing, but I’m not sure how exactly. Why is it changing, and more importantly what can I change to stay onboard?”

Memory lane

The question triggered a flood of competing thoughts. Mainly it brought me to go back several years in memory, to review some talks I listened to, books that I’ve read, conferences I attended. Because this person had a very interesting point. And I realized: we don’t talk that much about architecture in the Agile discourse, do we?

Architecture overlooked

With the relentless focus on customer-valuable increments that Agile preaches, most of the time we are discussing new releasable functionalities, their UX, their built-in quality…