This is not just an AI problem. It’s an architecture problem that AI makes visible, and more urgent. As teams move faster with AI, centralised architecture governance becomes an even bigger bottleneck, pushing more decisions into the implicit. But AI also creates an opportunity: we can feed engineering and architectural principles forward into the software development lifecycle, earlier and more explicitly than before. That requires facilitating and coaching architecture at the team level, not reviewing output after the fact. Real practitioner stories on facilitating software architecture consistently confirm: the answer is not more control, but collaborative practices and strong engineering principles that make architecture a shared team capability.

This is an interactive session. Expect to think out loud, share how you make architectural decisions today, and explore together what it takes to keep architecture intentional, explicit, and human-led in an AI-accelerated world.

Het bericht Who Is Actually Making the Architectural Decisions Right Now? Facilitating Architecture in an AI-Accelerated World verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

The human mind is a powerful tool, yet it is systematically prone to errors. These errors aren’t just abstract ideas; they are design flaws in our own decision-making that can lead directly to fragile architectures, ballooning technical debt, and costly rework, regardless of whether the code was human or machine-generated. Biases like the anchoring effect (getting stuck on the first idea) or the sunk cost fallacy (clinging to a failing project) are constantly shaping your software.

Join us to move from a reactive, bias-driven approach to a deliberate, resilient, and ultimately more effective design process. This talk explores how cutting-edge research from behavioural economics can be applied directly to software architecture and development, with or without AI assistance.

We will move beyond simply being aware of biases. We will introduce a practical, five-step checklist designed to systematically ‘debias’ your design choices, helping you build both better software and a better decision-making habit for all your technical work.

You will learn how to:

• Establish Simple Rules: Avoid the Law of Triviality (bikeshedding) to dramatically increase velocity, ensuring your team stops debating low-risk choices and focuses their cognitive energy on the decisions that actually stick.
• Be Decision-Ready: Recognize when Myopic Misery is rushing you into action, or when Status Quo Bias is trapping you in inaction due to cognitive load—ensuring you make choices based on strategy, not mental fatigue.
• Broaden the Frame: Combat Functional Fixedness and Additive Bias to uncover the elegant solutions your brain naturally ignores—breaking the cycle of solving every problem by simply adding more complexity.
• Seek Independent Advice: Move past Overconfidence Bias and Correlation Neglect to stop mistaking echoed opinions for independent proof, ensuring you are acting on diverse data rather than a single weak signal amplified by the group.
• Test Your Assumptions: Inoculate your team against the Authority Bias of AI-generated code and the Illusion of Control it fosters, replacing the dangerous comfort of “black box” certainty with rigorous stress-testing that withstands real-world chaos.

Het bericht Debiasing Your Software Design Decision-Making verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

I will share the definition of architectural decisions from my co-authored book Collaborative Software Design and discuss how social dynamics impact them. Next, I will share my experience of integrating Collaborative Software Design with the architectural advice process, as outlined in Andrew Harmel-law’s book, Facilitating Software Design. The combination of the two enables an environment where concerns are voiced constructively and turned into valuable input for the decision. Combining the two doesn’t just lead to better technical outcomes—it also creates a stronger sense of shared ownership and commitment. Instead of fighting resistance, you’ll be facilitating true team ownership of your architecture.

Het bericht Technical Leadership for Architectural Decision Making verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

In this talk, we’ll share how user needs mapping helps teams make aligned, decentralised decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain layer of a Wardley Map, enriched with clear team responsibilities. Mapping the value chain and defining boundaries give teams a clear view of user needs and who else—stream-aligned or platform teams—is involved. This clarity fosters productive conversations to identify dependencies and align requirements. By connecting maps across teams, we create a foundation for resilient, well-informed decisions. We’ll share how we facilitated these sessions and ensured the maps remain actionable and up to date.

Het bericht Enabling aligned decentralised architecture decisions through user needs mapping verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

Join our interactive workshop that explores the dynamic relationship between organizational culture and software design. This session offers a balanced mix of theoretical insights into how cultures function and impact our professional lives, coupled with practical exercises to help implement these concepts. We will delve into the critical role of culture in shaping software design, with a special focus on ‘symbols’ as a core cultural element. Participants will engage with a domain model that illustrates how language, as a cultural symbol, significantly influences both domain-specific and software contexts. Through hands-on exercises, we’ll examine techniques to grasp the cultural significance of these symbols, equipping participants to either adapt effectively or employ strategies and heuristics to transform them. This includes practices such as experimenting with alternative narratives, using storytelling to understand and convey culture, and leveraging humor as a cultural lens. The workshop will conclude with a series of case studies presented through interactive discussions, showcasing the application of various techniques and heuristics in collaborative software design. These studies will highlight both successes and challenges in navigating and reshaping cultural symbols and behaviors.

Het bericht Software designing your models and architecture to fit with the culture verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

We’ll discuss the differences between tactical and strategic design and why balancing both is essential for staying adaptable. I’ll provide examples to show why focusing only on tactical design, like writing code with aggregates, or only on strategic design, like context mapping and bounded context design, can cause issues. Instead, I’ll show that the key to successful software design is maintaining an ongoing dialogue with stakeholders like users and domain experts and collaborating on the design process. A valuable technique for this ongoing dialogue is collaborative modelling. In this meetup, I will demonstrate the collaborative modelling tool EventStorming and show you how it can help maintain that ongoing dialogue. You will leave understanding what DDD is and why collaborative software design is important for building adaptable and resilient software.

Het bericht Introduction to Domain-Driven Design and Collaborative software design verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

As an important part of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), this approach jointly optimises user journeys with business processes. It enhances team communication, facilitates in making well-informed decisions, minimises errors, and removes blockers to flow between stakeholders, user designers and the team thus maximising the software’s value and impact. Most importantly, it establishes a shared understanding among all stakeholders and the team. Adopting this strategy is vital for the creation of high-quality, resilient, and user-centric software.

The challenge is in requiring all stakeholders to actively collaborate in the same physical environment, managing complex social dynamics. The key to success in Collaborative Software Design is managing these interactions within a sociotechnical framework.

Join Evelyn and Kenny as they show how Collaborative Software Design enables teams to develop a shared understanding with stakeholders. This understanding becomes a living record of the current business needs and the software landscape, guiding the design for future developments.

Het bericht Bridging the Design Gap: How Collaborative Modelling removes blockers to flow between stakeholders and teams verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

Our goal is always to create the best architecture for our business challenges, but this depends heavily on our teams’ delivery capabilities. This brings us to a fundamental question: If our teams face difficulties in implementing what is ideally the ‘best’ architecture, can we still consider it the most effective solution?

Join us in this interactive, hands-on session, where you will delve into a real-world software design challenge that intersects both software and team boundaries. Equipped with detailed context and comprehensive software diagrams, you will design in groups two potential software designs. You are free to approach the challenge in any way you prefer, and we will provide a message flow modelling template to help you quickly start addressing your challenge. From those initial two designs, we will introduce you to the fundamental principles of Team Topologies, focusing on how cognitive load affects the teams involved and your software design. This understanding of cognitive load will be crucial as we further explore more solutions to the design challenge. Throughout this session, you will gain practical insights into how cognitive load influences your approach to software design. You will learn how to effectively incorporate Team Topologies into your design decisions. By the end of this experience, you will have hands-on software design experience, tackling complex design challenges with a team-first approach.

Het bericht Collaborative software design for team cognitive load verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

However, one social system significantly blocks the flow of development of these diverse perspectives: patriarchy. Patriarchy is a social construct where men predominantly hold power and exercise dominance in areas such as political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and property ownership. Feminists have been actively working to challenge and change this patriarchal system for the better. Despite these efforts, the system still favours men, maintaining their dominant status, and will not evolve without their active involvement. Additionally, patriarchy limits men as well, endorsing only traits traditionally seen as ‘masculine’ and disregarding those seen as ‘feminine.’ This raises the question: how do we start the process of eMANcipation, involve men in the movement towards feminism, and as a result, improve our software design practices?

Join me in this talk as I explore patriarchy and its significant effects on software design. Drawing from personal experiences, I will discuss how patriarchy affects men and argue that for genuine equality, men need to undergo changes too. I will demonstrate how incorporating Process Work and Deep Democracy into software design can bring about the necessary transformation. By adopting the idea of role fluidity, we can start breaking down the patriarchal system in software design, ensuring that every perspective is appreciated and nurtured. You will leave with a deeper understanding of how patriarchy influences software design and practical steps you can immediately apply to foster a shift towards a more inclusive environment.

Het bericht Effective software design: The role of men in debugging patriarchy in IT verscheen eerst op Weave IT.

As an important part of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), this approach jointly optimises user journeys with business processes. It enhances team communication, facilitates in making well-informed decisions, and minimises errors, thus maximising the software’s value and impact. Most importantly, it establishes a shared understanding among all stakeholders. Adopting this strategy is vital for the creation of high-quality, resilient, and user-centric software.

The challenge is in requiring all stakeholders to actively collaborate in the same physical environment, managing complex social dynamics. The key to success in Collaborative Software Design is managing these interactions within a sociotechnical framework.

Join Evelyn and Kenny as they show how Collaborative Software Design enables teams to develop a shared understanding with stakeholders. This understanding becomes a living record of the current business needs and the software landscape, guiding the design for future developments.

Het bericht Navigating the Future of Software Development: Embracing Collaborative modelling verscheen eerst op Weave IT.