Architecture Clinic
Registration and Information
Overview
IDesign's architecture clinic instructs how to quickly, effectively, and correctly create high-quality system architectures using the IDesign Method, along with obtaining practical experience through a comprehensive hands-on approach. The clinic combines elements of instruction and guidance, teamwork, peer-critiqued, and an IDesign architect review, which allows participants to depart not only with the architecture and design diagrams for their particular system, but also with expertise that would otherwise take years of on-the-job-experience to obtain, covering both architecture and soft skills.
The architecture clinic is designed to guide and accelerate your exposure to the practices of modern software design. It is a five day highly interactive event where you will learn, improve, and exercise software architecture skills. During the clinic, you will architect several systems, most of them based on real-world problems brought in by the clinic’s participants (and you may offer a system for the teams to work on as well, which could be a nice side benefit). Through guided practice, you will exercise the IDesign Method and become proficient at it - the clinic is run by an IDesign master architect who will teach you the thought process and the rationale behind the design decisions. Along the way we will walk you through the steps of the IDesign Method, share insight and best practices, and also help develop the “soft skills” that are so important to success such as customer interview and design review presentation. In normal day-to-day work, this type of knowledge and insight can take many years to attain. The clinic will shorten your learning curve through our years of deep industry experience, and provide a perfect forum for focused, high caliber discussions and mentorship.
The clinic starts with a thorough presentation of the IDesign Method, after which the first system is presented. The attendees are divided into teams; each analyzes and architects the system. Then, the IDesign architect will critic each team's design as well as present the school's solution. For the subsequent systems design, all teams are reshuffled, so that no team is ever the same. This helps train architects to focus and communicate, and work efficiently and effectively with other architects.
But the clinic is not just about architecture. A good design is only good if you were able to build it. The clinic bridges the crucial gap between the design and the development in the last day. You will see how to derive a project out of the architecture, and design the project to build one of the systems.
Format
A combination of presentation and a lot of hands-on practice.
Target Audience
Any architect, project lead or senior developer would benefit greatly from the clinic.
Duration
Five very intense days.
Offering
Available as an on-site training class and as a public training class.
Outline
Introduction to the IDesign Method
- The IDesign Method
- Classic mistakes
- Volatility-Based decomposition
- Universal design principles
- The architect's challenge
- Axes of volatility
- Design sample
- Volatility and the business
- Open and closed architecture
- Structure with clients, managers, engines, resource access and utilities
- Design validation
- Containing changes
- Design Don'ts
System 1
- The interview thought process
- System and business overview
- Core use cases by the IDesign architect
- Service decomposition
- Architecture diagrams
- Presentation and review of teams design
- School solution
System 2
- System and business overview
- Core use cases by the students
- Service decomposition
- Architecture diagrams
- Presentation and review of teams design
- School solution
- Mid-week debriefing and assessment
System 3
- System and business overview
- Core use cases by the students
- Service decomposition
- Architecture diagrams
- Presentation and review of teams design
- School solution
Project Plan Design
- Designing a project for the architecture
- Effort estimation techniques
- Services dependency tree
- Project network
- Assigning resources
- Scheduling activities
- Analyzing shape of project plan
- Changing architecture to accommodate plan
- Feasibility
- Planning and risk
Upcoming Classes
Architecture Clinic
Online, EST
Testimonials
Just got back from a grueling week at IDesign’s Architecture Clinic. ...read more Much like the Master Class, I feel this one propelled me ahead years (which explains why I’m so exhausted). I’ve struggled with what functional decomposition is, why it’s bad, and what’s the right way to decompose based on volatility. A couple days into the Clinic, I was still stuck and thinking that maybe my brain was just not wired right. However, after working with my team to decompose our third system, things finally clicked, lights flicked on, rubber met road, and I got it! I can just about guarantee if you’re struggling like I was, the Clinic is the solution to your problem. The two things the Clinic gave me that are tough to get in the real world were four opportunities to practice architecting a system – non-trivial, real systems BTW – and get my designs reviewed by master software architects. Those two things in conjunction made it worth every penny, and everything else – hearing eight other designs and reviews, the IDesign Method training, the process lecture, the bonus classes, lunches and dinners with the IDesign architects – made it that much better.
I’ve been practicing the IDesign Method for a while now, and over the years my solutions keep getting better. ...read more They are consistent, they meet the requirements, they are extensible, easy to maintain, scalable, robust, secure, and delivered on time. I will admit I still make mistakes, both technical and soft-skills, and I wish I had a world-class architect looking over my shoulder telling me what I was doing wrong, how to recognize functional design, how to spot process mistakes and how to resolve the issues. That is what the Architecture Clinic addressed for me. A week of having IDesign architects guiding and teaching me what I needed to do, techniques for how to do it correctly, how to spot mistakes early on and fix them, and how to present my ideas with confidence. The speed at which everyone attending the clinic learnt was phenomenal. There were people that weren’t full time architects and had no industry knowledge, designing the architecture for financial trading software on day three of the clinic!! The solutions presented by the groups on day 4 were what I would expect a top software architect with years of training and experience to produce. The transformation from day 1 to day 4 was truly amazing. In summary, I will never have to ask myself what I need to do again. I simply follow the mechanical process of the IDesign Method and apply the techniques of the Architecture Clinic, following its steps and at the end I will have captured the correct requirements, a beautiful architecture, an impressive presentation technique, and a software delivery process ready for success.
There are moments in life that stake claims to permanent spaces in our minds. ...read more Some are universally relatable; marriage, graduation, the birth of a child. Sometimes though these are uniquely personal, moments that can only be described as epiphanies. For me, a number of these moments were instigated by Juval’s no-nonsense, no excuses approach to Software Architecture. Awakenings like this don’t take place in some classroom, being led through scripted labs by a questionably-qualified instructor who fails to answer any question whose answer can’t be gleamed from the course materials or found by consulting Google. Your brain has to be stimulated and engaged enough to force this kind of introspection, and that’s what the Clinic delivers. I cannot begin to express how career-changing a course like this can be when it is led by a true master of the craft. The Clinic didn’t merely teach me new things, it taught me new ways to think about things I already knew and also to revisit things I thought I already knew. If you haven’t attended the Clinic, do it. If you’ve already attended the Clinic, send your team. You will produce software leaps and bounds ahead of your best prior to the Clinic.