The Logical Architecture Diagram
Those who know me Sawyer Effect know that I don’t care much about structure, sorry! I guess I’ve always been that way and that made me a bad student. I am, however, an average professional, Maybe the difference is that I like applying common sense to real problems, having a problem to solve motivates me and after I solved enough problems I gained some experience and intuition.
When I was studying Computer Science, I had a very hard teacher that used to teach Operating Systems, I didn’t learn a lot, same with UML and other recipes, we would spend hours fighting the tools to create diagrams that would become obsolete by the time we‘d’ finish them, and as much as I care about Greek mythology, I never wanted to be Sisyphus!
My first years as a professional developer were the same, loving working on code, until the opportunity to lead a team came, I was going to take over a team from one of the tech leaders I respected a lot and I was very nervous, being a developer I would always spend a lot of time in the trinches, trying to crack a problem, I thought leading a team would be the same but multiplied.
So there I was, first day trying to tame the Beast! Perfect! Let’s code! Or not, we would spend a lot of time talking about the system, but every now and then our tech lead would stop and work on a diagram, it was a beautiful Logical Architecture Diagram, and I remember thinking, “hey man, we are busy here, stop playing with Omnigraffle”. Even worse, he would insist I got a license for a ridiculous amount of money, we only had around 6 in the whole company and I had to beg for one.
Since I was new at this, I decided to just go with the flow and just do it, I had enough worries to get fancy, so I followed my favorite mantra:
To follow the path, look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master.
After several weeks, I started to notice a trend, developers I was leading would tell me: “hey, let’s look at the diagram I need to show you something”, I would use it to work with my boss and tell him: “We need more money for this square, this piece here” and I will show it to the client to explain the parts that were completed, the parts that were being done, and the missing pieces. It was one diagram to rule them all, it was the big picture.
The Big Picture
Many companies have different names for the Tech Lead position, some call it Architect, Solution Architect, Tech Lead, Team lead, etc. But regardless of what you have in mind what all those positions have in common is that that one person owns the big picture of the system we are building, if you were to have one job and one job only as a tech lead it would be to describe quickly how the system works and be able to do it in an efficient way, so in all my years doing this, the best way I’ve found to do it is by having this diagram handy and use it to focus our attention in the search for common understanding of how it works.
Conclusion
Regardless of who you feel about people coming from planet architecture and what design and modeling artifacts the value I found in this diagram is that is an artifact that allows me to explain in a single picture our whole system, a quick way to find common ground between parties. Feel free to tell me what are your recipes in the comments or at oscar at sawyereffect.com
Or even better bring your recipes to our office and help us create beautiful things, we are hiring!
P.S. We also have tacos.
