Joe's Blog

Six serving men in Software Architecture

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest.

Extracted from Rudyard Kipling's Poem "I Keep Six Honest..."

I was reading the collected works of Rudyard Kipling recently in a bookstore and this struck me since I knew of an architectural framework very similar to the poem in software development. It’s called Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture.
It’s an interrogative framework consisting of six columns asking the What, How, Where, Who, When and Why which relate to Data, Function, Network, People, Time and Motivation in the same order. The rows are divided by the owners. They consist of Scope, Business Model, System Model, Technology Model and Detailed Representation. This forms cells which indicate a type of operation performed in that cell. The cells can be addressed in any order and need not be consecutive.
Software developers should be aware of this architecture since several organizations already use this very successfully. It’s an interesting architectural model and to achieve it completely is idealism but the goal is to strive to reach there. This process thereby improves architectural process. The question then is this applicable in Agile methodology ? Yes, very much and there are several successful real world examples of such utilization.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 9:20 AM