Architectural runway: What it means and it why it matters in agile.

So I had an interview with a tech lead candidate today and he introduced a term that I found highly applicable to dealing with architectural risk in Agile project management.

Agile is great for delivering technical features, we all know that by now. The trade off however is when you need to support an application, a sprint-by-sprint approach to architecture can become a serious risk over 2–3 years of sprints.

The runway in this sense enables Epics and Stories to take off. It’s therefore a requirement of the technical team to ensure that the application has a long enough architectural runway, so that the epics and stories coming up can be delivered. The aim is to reduce technical debt and time consuming re-work over time.

There will still be times when a major re-architecture project is required but I hypothesis that this approach will reduce the frequency and impact of this.

Further reading on Architectural Runway