Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change
A framework for designing software architectures that evolve over time, using fitness functions to protect important characteristics while enabling incremental change.
Software systems must adapt to constant change—new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms emerge continuously. This book presents evolutionary architecture as a way to manage architectural change while protecting the characteristics that matter most.
Core Concept
Evolutionary architecture supports guided, incremental change across technical, organizational, and temporal dimensions. The key mechanism: fitness functions—automated assessments that verify whether architectural properties remain intact during modifications.
The Three Pillars
Guided change — Fitness functions steer evolution toward desired outcomes, providing objective assessment of architecture characteristics like performance, security, and structural integrity.
Incremental modification — Small changes verified continuously. Software's defining characteristic is hundreds of thousands of moving parts, any of which can change at any time.
Multiple dimensions — Not just code, but data, security, and operational characteristics. Database schemas must evolve alongside application code.
Why It Matters
Traditional architecture assumes stability—design upfront, build to spec. Reality proves otherwise. Requirements shift, technologies emerge, teams change. Evolutionary architecture embraces this reality by building adaptability into the system's DNA.
Related
See building-evolutionary-architectures for Neal Ford's talk covering the same concepts with practical examples and code snippets.