Shift Left for Architects
Continuous Modernization:
Prevent Tech Debt Disasters
What is Continuous Modernization?
Continuous modernization is an iterative methodology to continuously monitor, detect, pinpoint, and fix application architecture drift issues before they cause technical debt meltdowns. Architectural drift is the accumulation of architectural components, decisions, and drift that results in “a big ball of mud” including growing class entanglement, dead-code, and long dependency chains. Architectural Debt is not code complexity or cyclomatic complexity.
Observability-Driven Architecture
Application architects lack the observability, visibility, and tooling to understand, track, and manage architectural technical debt as it develops and grows over time. vFunction Continuous Modernization Manager allows architects to “shift left” into the ongoing software development lifecycle from an architectural perspective to manage, monitor, and fix application architecture anomalies on an iterative, continuous basis before they erupt into bigger problems.
According to a Gartner® report
“Applications and software engineering leaders must create a continuous modernization culture. Every product or platform team must manage their technical debt, develop a modernization strategy and continuously modernize their product and platforms — including the ecosystem. Teams must ensure that they don’t fall victim to “drift” over time.”
Source: Gartner, Use Continuous Modernization to Optimize Legacy Applications, Stefan Van Der Zijden, Deacon D.K Wan, et al…, 20 July 2022.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
Why Baseline Your Application Architecture?
The first place to start a Continuous Modernization best practice is by baselining your application architecture. A baseline application architecture profiles an existing application and establishes a foundational basis from which to compare future architectural changes and detect architectural drift issues from this basis. vFunction Continuous Modernization Manager baselines key architectural elements so you can set thresholds and be alerted proactively.
Finding and Fixing Architectural Drift
Architectural drift is a divergence over time from established application architectural baselines that indicate a discrepancy between an organization’s software architectural standards and the actual observed architecture. vFunction Continuous Modernization Manager uses the baseline architectural measurements to establish thresholds for key technical debt issues such as detecting a major change in service exclusivity. vFunction measures and baselines service exclusivity to determine the the percentage of independent classes and resources of a service, alerting when new dependencies are introduced that expand architectural technical debt.
Stop Future Monoliths From Forming
An architectural anomaly is a detected break or violation of a specific architectural baseline (such as new service detected, new common class found, new dependencies introduced (service exclusivity issue) or detection of a critical architecture issue (new dead code found, new high tech debt class identified). If left undetected and unattended to, these architectural anomalies will snowball into big balls of mud and create yet another monolith. Continuous modernization prevents future monoliths from ever forming.