Building Evolutionary Architectures

Preface

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Acknowledgments

Neal would like to thank all the attendees of the various conferences at which he has spoken over the last few years to help hone and revise this material live. He would also like to thank the technical reviewers who went above and beyond to provide excellent feedback and advice, especially Venkat Subramanium, Eoin Woods, Simon Brown, and Martin Fowler. Neal would also like to thank his cats Winston, Parker, and Isabella for providing useful distractions that always lead to insights. He thanks his friend John Drescher, all his ThoughtWorks colleagues, Norman Zapien for his crafty ear, his yearly Pasty Geeks vacation group and neighborhood Cocktail Club for support and friendship. And finally, he’d like to thank his long-suffering wife, who endures his travel and other professional indignities with a smile.

Rebecca would like to thank all of the colleagues, conference attendees and speakers, and authors who have, over the years, contributed ideas, tools, and methods and asked clarifying questions about the field of evolutionary architecture. She would echo Neal’s thanks to the technical reviewers for their careful reading and commentary. Further, Rebecca would like to thank her co-authors for all the enlightening conversations and discussions while we worked together on this book. In particular, she thanks Neal for the great discussion, or perhaps debate, they had several years ago regarding the distinction between emergent and evolutionary architecture. These ideas have come a long way since that first conversation.

Patrick would like to thank all of his colleagues and customers at ThoughtWorks, who have driven the need and provided the testbed to articulate the ideas in building evolutionary architecture. He would also like to echo Neal and Rebecca’s thanks to the technical reviewers, whose feedback helped to improve the book immensely. Finally, he would like to thank his co-authors for the past several years and for the opportunity to work closely together on this topic, despite the numerous time zones and flights that made meeting in person the rare occasion.