Kata Your Way To Better Architectures
A workshop teaching attendees how to use Architecture Kata (https://archkatas.herokuapp.com/) to refine their own architecture skills and/or test these skills in potential employees.
Background
"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
Architecture Kata exercises (https://archkatas.herokuapp.com/) are great activities for deliberately building skills in on-the-spot technical solution design. This workshop gives attendees both a theoretical and practical experience with this activity and enables them to lead these exercises with their own teams/organisations.
Workshop Content
The workshop describes the purpose and structure of architecture kata and introduces an incremental approach for completing a kata. The workshop facilitators will use this approach to progressively complete one kata during the workshop, with the attendees following the same approach to complete a second kata over the course of the day. The final stage of the workshop consists of each attendees sharing and discussing their solutions with the entire set of attendees.
A number of tools/techniques for various parts of the design process will be introduced, although attendees are free to choose their own tools.
The use of architecture kata as a recruiting tool will also be described.
Audience
The intended audience for this workshop are architects, tech leads, and/or senior engineers who are growing into roles that require architectural thinking.
Originally an itinerant teacher of programming at university, Andy has been writing code professionally since 1996 in Melbourne, Brisbane, San Francisco, Leeds and Singapore. Joining ThoughtWorks as a technical lead in 2002, Andy has deep experience in agile development and has, since 2013, become one of those dreary functional programming evangelists you dread speaking to at parties. Andy is a regular speaker at conferences in Australia and user groups in Melbourne, even though he does not understand monads… not even a little bit.
Sarah is a Principal Technologist working for ThoughtWorks, where she specialises in developing robust software for the future, delivered today. Sarah wears many hats: software architect, technical lead, CTO coach, conference speaker. Although primarily focused on software design, she also has a lot to say about how software should be developed to accommodate the changing pace of business and how people should be treated within teams.