How to Code

Even as an Enterprise Architect, the most abstract level of architecture, you should still know what developers are doing on their daily basis. And if you do not understand how this is done, you may face two major problems:

• Developers won’t accept your sayings.
• You do not understand challenges and needs of developers.
• Have a side project: The purpose of this is to try out new technologies and tools to find out how development is done today and in the future. Experience is the combination of observations, emotions and hypothesis (“Experience and Knowledge Management in Software Engineering” by Kurt Schneider). Reading a tutorial or some pros and cons is good. But this is just “book knowledge”. Only if you try out things by yourself you can experience emotions and can built up hypothesis about why something is good or bad. And the longer you work with a technology the better your hypothesis will get. This will help you to take better decisions in your day to day work. As I started programming I had no code completion and only some utility libraries to speed up development. Obviously, with this background I would make wrong decisions today. Today, we have tons of programming languages, frameworks, tools, processes and practices. Only if you have some experience and a rough overview in the major trends you are able to take part of the conversation and to steer development into the right direction.
• Find the right things to try out: You cannot try out everything. This is simply impossible. You need a more structured approach. One source I recently discovered is the Technology Radar from ThoughtWorks. They categorize technologies, tools, platforms, languages and frameworks into four categories:
  • Adopt: “strong feeling to be ready for enterprise usage”.
  • Trial: “enterprise should try it in one project that can handle the risk”.
  • Assess: “explore how it affects your enterprise”
  • Hold: “process with caution”.

With this categorization it is easier to get an overview of new things and their readiness to better evaluate which trend to explore next.