https://nelis.boucke.be/post/architectural-katas/
Architectural katas are a great way to spice up the architectural skills of your team or community, and practice to have productive discussions about architecture.
I always receive great feedback after (co)-organizing architectural katas 1 and I regularly get questions on organizing them with others. So with Matteo Pierro, I did run a session at XP-days Benelux 2019 on how you can organize these katas yourself, sharing experiences to encourage others organizing the same kind of katas.
Ivory tower architects defining the architecture for your team are from a bygone era. The general trend is that development teams define their software architecture, or at least that teams are strongly involved in defining the architecture.
But people cannot learn architecture well out of thin air, they need a way to learn and practice. This was also the main motivation of Ted Neward when coming up with architectural katas illustrated by the following two quotes.
Poster: Why architetural katas
“How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course.” Fred Brooks ”So how are we supposed to get great architects, if they only get the chance to architect fewer than a half-dozen times in their career?” Ted Neward
Ted was searching for a way to practice defining architectures and, inspiration by code katas, came up with the concept of architectural katas.
Poster: Steps in an architectural kata
Architectural katas are a workshop were several small groups (3-5 people) practice discussing and designing architectures. Typically the workshop involves several iterations.
At the start of an iteration, each group gets a project description and some constraints, and gets some time to discover what is needed, ask clarifying questions to the “customer” (often the facilitator), discusses technology options, and design a vision for the architecture.
After discussing for a while, each group presents their results to the other groups to gather feedback. The iteration ends with some reflection and a break.
For more information, check out the description on the architectural kata website.
Organizing a good workshop asks for proper preparation and facilitation. It might look daunting at first, but I hope the next sections can help you on your way.
The learnings in this post are extracted from organizing events like this over 2 years, from evening meetups, conference sessions, open full-day sessions till closed company sessions. The audience for those sessions varied between 10 people and 40 people.
