Software complexity 2

Continuing my previous article, we will discuss scale, support and accidental complexity, types you can manage, reduce and even remove.

Software complexity

Complexity is the primary enemy of software design and architecture. The primary job of a software architect is to remove, reduce, or manage complexity in that order. But what if the problem space itself is complex? How do you do that? What does it even mean? What is complexity, anyway?

There are actually multiple types of software complexity, and each type requires a different approach.

What is abstraction

Developers use the word "abstraction" regularly, yet there is limited understanding of what it means. In a broader sense, abstraction has been overshadowed by its use in some languages to denote a method or class that will be overwritten later, as well as the phrase "use abstraction." is understood to mean "write an abstract class.".

Abstraction is one of the most important techniques for achieving decoupling and stabilizing your public interfaces at any level.

Modulith structure

There are many ways to create a Modulith, and I will introduce you to one of them. The important parts that we will discuss are: Application layer, Business modules, Facades / Repositories, Event bus/broker, CQ Router and Utilities.

Understanding the roles of these parts is essential to building a code base that won't end up as a "big ball of mud".

The modulith way

The monolithic style has a bad reputation, but it is useful for smaller applications. The problem is not the monolith itself, but rather how it is written.

Why choose a monolith over a distributed architecture, such as microservices? Networking creates its own set of problems. There are benefits, but also costs.

Modular monolith - modulith is the way how to start application.

Values, goals and loyalty

"You should be loyal to the company, share our goals and align your values with the company's values”. That's not going to happen... Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "I'm not going to do that," I'm saying it won't happen, it can't happen, it's not possible.

People are not loyal to the company, people are loyal to the people in the company and enjoy the culture created by the people in the company.

So many fallacies

Some people think dependency injection should be everywhere and is state of the art. Some people think layered architecture is for everything, and some people think the same about microservices.

Some people think serverless is always the way to go. Everything has to be written in Rust on the backend and VUE3 on the frontend.

Some people think you make one manager product owner, another scrum master, send them both on a 2 day certification, have standup, review, retro, Jira and you are an agile team doing scrum.

All these things have one thing in common: a lack of understanding of values and principles.

Values

Why do you do what you do? What makes you want to go to work? What drives your decisions? What is your professional purpose?

tl;dr - it's not the money.

I firmly believe that there are other values that are more valuable than money. Values that create a better business, a more sustainable business, while actually making money. These values are: customer, team and quality; and they go hand in hand.