Software-Architecture Revolution is the process of making profound, large-scale changes to the fundamental structures of software systems to improve its attributes, such as availability, scalability, and maintainability, or to enable new requirements that are incompatible with the current capabilities. Architectural revolution demands substantial effort from the organization and needs effective leadership to be successful. This talk draws from practical experiences (patterns) to improve the effectiveness of architectural revolution initiatives.

Target Audience: Architects, Managers, Project Leaders, Coaches, Developers, Product Owners, Decision Makers
Prerequisites: Leadership, Architecture, Project Management, Working with Teams, Agile mindset
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
Pressure to adapt to and shape the market requires agile organizations to add new features, accommodate new interactions, and have new teams work on adapting the software. Sometimes a straightforward software architecture that starts out small when communication is easy can support guided, incremental architectural changes and can gradually evolve with its environment, remaining fit for its purposes. Other times it is not so simple: the initial software architecture can be poorly suited for supporting required changes, or the accumulation of suboptimal architectural decisions (also known as architectural technical debt) can be too severe; in either case, the architecture needs an extensive revision; especially for the organization to remain agile and adapt to the changing market.
Software architecture revolution can be defined as the process of making profound, large-scale changes to the fundamental structures of a software system to improve its attributes, such as availability, scalability, and maintainability, or to enable new requirements that are incompatible with the current capabilities. Architectural revolution usually demands substantial effort from the organization and thus depends on effective leadership to be successful. However, while there is plenty of research on the technical aspects of any architectural transformation, not much is available from the leadership perspective. The role of managers and other leaders include championing the revolution initiative, prioritizing activities, negotiating the allocation of people and resources, evaluating results, taking corrective actions, and reporting achievements. This talk draws from practical experiences to describe patterns to improve the effectiveness of architectural revolution initiatives.