Agile Architecture

Last Updated: May 2025

Agile Architecture emphasizes the minimum amount of design upfront, and focusing on building something and evolving the architecture as our understanding changes.

Architecture in software development is often defined as relationships between the parts in a system. Traditional approaches to software architecture emphasize Big Upfront Design - get it right at the start. The problem, of course, is that requires us to foresee all architectural considerations (scale, security, fault tolerance, fault recovery) at the moment when our understanding of our problems is at its weakest. Agile Architecture allows for the design to evolve and adapt as more is learned about what is needed.

Key principles

  • We won’t get it right on the first try, be prepared to iterate
  • Refactor
  • Focus on Simplicty
  • Make it Testable

(Hint: when searching for more ideas, consider using the term: “Evolutionary Architecture”)

Agile Pain Relief Blog Entries

Resource Links

Related Books

Agile Architects
Agile Architectural Patterns
Last Responsible Moment

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