Last Monday, nearly 40 people showed up for Mario Cardinal's presentation, Best Practices to Design a Modular Architecture , at Vermont.NET. This is an unusually large crowd for our group, so I was pretty impressed - but not surprised. Developers don't get enough time to think about architecture. Mario spent a few hours drilling in to different areas from an iterative process working with the client to determine what the software requirements are to considerations for developing applications in modular pieces that can be reused, tested out of scope and more easily deployed.
The attendees were definitely engaged and gave some push-back about the reality of some of these practices when there are deadlines, budgets and resources that do not accommodate for them. Not all shops have the ability to stop and just think for a while. Either way, I think it's valuable for developers to have these concepts in mind because you never know when you'll get the ability to use them.
Even though I do not consider myself an architect, I was pleased to see that many of the things that Mario talked about are practices that I have evolved for my own work over the years.
The presentation is a high-level version of a full day workshop that he'll be giving in Montreal on February 27th. For more information on that see http://www.devteach.com/SpecialEvent.aspx.
Mario cleverly used MindMap to present his ideas rather than PowerPoint. You can grab it at http://www.mariocardinal.com/download/modular-architecture.zip If you do not have MindManager, here is where you can download a viewer: http://www.mindjet.com/resources/downloads/mm_viewer.aspx
Thanks from all of us at Vermont.NET to Mario for driving 2.5 hours from Montreal to do this presentation and for the great presentation.
Thanks also to Marlena Farnham, the HR Director at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters for sponsoring the meeting and GE Healthcare for hosting.
