Eberhard Wolff
Slides from my presentation at #JAX
Is #SoftwareArchitecture Really Necessary?
https://speakerdeck.com/ewolff/is-software-architecture-really-necessary
Is Software Architecture Really Necessary?

Software architecture often feels like an unnecessary burden—introducing complexity and slowing down the process of just writing code. Why not skip it a…

Speaker Deck
May 13, 2025 at 1:03pmFedica
Show threadAndreasJun 20, 2025
@ewolff i like your slides in #softwarearchitecture.
I have the feeling that this sketches the logical engineering from the beginning of this century. I sometimes wonder if today we are more at an agile SW evolution that Ernesto G. sketched here: https://garba.org/posts/2021/uml/ . I wonder if the world has changed or if i simply got older and my viewpoint changed ... If the world has changed, is maybe a reason that our SW is much more complex? We do not understand all this anymore.
Has UML Died Without Anyone Noticing?

Stuck with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect? Time to upgrade to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Show threadEberhard WolffJun 20, 2025
@awarnke thanks. I don’t think the world has changed fundamentally. It seems to me that the mainstream tried a very formal approach in the nineties and also today in some cases that in reality doesn’t work.
Show threadocratatoJun 20, 2025

@ewolff @awarnke
I can think of a couple of drivers for this change.

High tech startups that know they need software, but everything is too fluid for any large scale design process to be workable. This spawned the Agile approach.

Another is the introduction of frameworks that provided a ready made architecture in which you could concentrate on the functionality.

I call the agile approach "debugging into existence". You end up with a system that just supports the test cases the users suggested. It is fragile software that will fail often.

Frameworks are good, until they are not. At some point you outgrow its design and then you have to start over with either a better framework, or actually do the architecture and build the infrastructure.

Both of these have their place in the IT world, but I wish they were not used in cases where people's livelihoods, or actual lives, are involved.