Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

A Customer Focused Architecture Team
When a strategy will be shared among several teams, some centralization of decision making does
seem attractive. The failed model of the ivory tower architect is not the only possibility. An
architecture team can act as a peer with various application teams, helping to coordinate and
harmonize their large-scale structures as well as 
BOUNDED CONTEXT
boundaries and other cross-
team technical issues. To be useful in this, they must have a mind set that emphasizes application
development.

---

On an organization chart, this team may look just like the traditional architecture team, but it is
actually different in every activity. Team members are true collaborators with development,
discovering patterns along with the developers, experimenting with various teams to reach
distillations, and getting their hands dirty.
I have seen this scenario a couple of times, when a project ends up with a lead architect who does
most of the things on the following list.
[ Team LiB ]

---

[ Team LiB ]
Six Essentials for Strategic Design Decision Making
Decisions must reach the entire team
Obviously, if everyone doesn't know the strategy and follow it, it is irrelevant. This requirement
leads people to organize around centralized architecture teams with official "authority"—so that
the same rules will be applied everywhere. Ironically, ivory tower architects are often ignored or
bypassed. Developers have no choice when the architects' lack of feedback from hands-on
attempts to apply their own rules to real applications results in impractical schemes.
On a project with very good communication, a strategic design that emerges from the application
team may actually reach everyone more effectively. The strategy will be relevant, and it will have
the authority that attaches to intelligent community decisions.
Whatever the system, be less concerned with the authority bestowed by management than with
the actual relationship the developers have with the strategy.