I recently spoke about Bytesize Architecure Sessions at the Global Software Architecture Summit. I got some interesting questions in the Q&A. We didn’t get through all of them, so have grouped them and answering in smaller posts. This one is about how to find the goal of the session.
Other posts on the series
- How this series started
- Questions about number of participants
- Questions about team’s attitude to collaboration
Questions about the goal of the session
- How to narrow the goal of the session to a specific case? How to reach a goal when the issue is is too big?
- How many sessions/weeks does it usually take to complete?
- Let’s imagine that part of a team has implemented a few new services How do we share the knowledge with the rest of the team using Bytesize Architecture Sessions?
All these questions are similar in that we are trying to understand how much work to attempt to do in one session, as well as to try to finish something across sessions.
Let’s start of with the bigger picture, what are you trying to achieve with these sessions.
If you are trying to get a team to be more homogeneous on their knowledge of their domain, then you can think about ways to break that up into diagrams that can be roughly drawn in 5 mimnutes, this is why I always suggest to start with C4
For example in one of the first teams we tried Butesize Session, as a team each of us knew some of the workflows well, but each of us didn’t know all of them, and we had no diagrams for them. So, in each Bytesize Session we did boxes and arrow diagrams of the workflows, one diagram per Session.
If we now focus on the how much the participants can model in one session. To answer consider
- What can be modeled in the few minutes that you have set for Alone Together
- How much experience do the participants have
- If you are not sure, think about what you need, then try it yourself, with less time(maybe four minutes instead of five)
As you iterate with the Sessions’ participants you will all start getting a feel for what you can do.
Bytesize Architecture Sessions help you evolve an Architecture practice, in a safe space.