Architectural Katas

“How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course.” Fred Brooks

“So how are we supposed to get great architects, if they only get the chance to architect fewer than a half-dozen times in their career?” Ted Neward

Architectural Katas are intended as a small-group (3-5 people) exercise, usually as part of a larger group (4-10 groups are ideal), each of whom is doing a different kata. A Moderator keeps track of time, assigns Katas, and acts as the facilitator for the exercise.

Each group is given a project (in many ways, an RFP–Request For Proposal) that needs development. The project team meets for a while, discovers requirements that aren’t in the orignal proposal by asking questions of the “customer” (the Moderator), discusses technology options that could work, and sketches out a rough vision of what the solution could look like. Then, after they’ve discussed for a while, the project team must present their solution to the other project teams in the room, and answer challenges (in the form of hard-but-fair questions) from the other project teams. Once that challenge phase is done, the room votes on their results, and the next project team takes the floor.

Rules

Basic rules of the architectural katas are described here!

Why it’s here?

In November 2019, I’ve attended O’Reilly Software Architecture conference in Berlin and I’ve been lucky to be able to participate in Architectural Katas event hosted there. I was also lucky to be (hopefully valuable) member of a winning team as you can see on the tweet bellow :)

However that’s not what I wanted to share here… ok, I did want to mention that. Anyway, it was such a great experience that I’ve decided to try organize this myself.

Events

To be organized! Stay tuned :)