Dr. Anna Liu discusses engineering an entrepreneurial software architecture. She outlines 8 key ingredients for success: 1) agile software architecture, 2) smart management of technical debt, 3) automated software assurance processes, 4) always delivering value to the market, 5) data-driven architectural decisions, 6) differentiated intellectual property, 7) strong people and team architecture, and 8) high performance and scalable software architecture. The document provides details on each of the 8 ingredients and emphasizes the importance of an agile approach that can rapidly innovate and deliver benefits to users.

1. © 2015 Unitrends 1
Unitrends cloud-empowered all-in-one continuity solutions increase your IT
confidence
Engineering an
Entrepreneurial
Software Architecture
Dr Anna Liu
Managing Director, Unitrends Australia
R&D Director, Cloud Products, Unitrends Inc.

2. My Journey
Research
Hi-Tech Startup
Commercial
Software
Business
Enterprise/
Software
Architectur
e

3. © 2015 Unitrends 3
Key Ingredients
1. Agile Software Architecture
2. Smart Management of Technical Debt
3. Automated Software Assurance Process
4. Always Delivering Value to Market
5. Data Driven Architectural Decisions
6. Differentiated Intellectual Property
7. Strong People and Team Architecture
8. High Performance and Infinitely Scalable Software
Architecture
Engineering an Entrepreneurial Architecture

4. © 2015 Unitrends 4
 Users and Market expect new features as
soon as the need arises
 Need to achieve rapid innovation, flexibility
for pivot, speed to market
 Informed anticipation with just-in-time and
just enough architecting
 Deliver direct benefits to users early and
often
 Technical leadership through coding,
coaching, collaboration
 Agile SA is Critical for scaling agile
development
1. Agile Software Architecture

5. © 2015 Unitrends 5
 Necessary tradeoff between
productivity and long term software
maintainability
 Need to accept some technical debt
 Create an engineering culture that
minimizes debt
 Constantly vigilant, avoid shortcuts,
use simple designs
 Refactor relentlessly
 Explicit, lightweight milestone
reviews; all hands demos;
retrospectives; Cruft days;
2. Smart Management of Technical Debt
Martin Fowler – Technical Debt Quadrant

6. © 2015 Unitrends 6
 Test driven development, all
developers write tests
 Nightly builds, Continuous
integration, regression tests
continuously
 Automated code analysis
 Peer review, Pull requests
 Team wide test and demo days
 Separate independent QA team
3. Automated Software Assurance Process

7. © 2015 Unitrends 7
 Customer Pain?
 Domain or vertical industry tough
problems?
 Addressable market size?
 Whose problem are you solving?
 Persona? Target User?
 In vetting/prioritizing R&D activities:
 Will this proposed new function,
deliver direct user visible benefit?
 In making architecture trade off
decisions:
 Which alternative will lead to max
user benefit and market value?
4. Always Delivering Value to Market

8. © 2015 Unitrends 8
5. Data Driven Decision Making

9. © 2015 Unitrends 9
 Sustainable Competitive Differentiation
 Core IP – High Value R&D
 Balance between proven SA patterns and
Counter intuitive approaches
 Protection strategies
 Product Market Fit
 Rapid Iterations, Solicit feedback
 Being creative and disruptive
 Purposeful pivots
 The Yuruware/vmBoomerang case study
 Core interoperability patents enabled us to
capture multiple waves of Business value:
DRaaS, Migration to Cloud, Hybrid Cloud
Management
6. Differentiated Intellectual Property

10. © 2015 Unitrends 10
 Resilient Core Team
 Complementary skills and
experience
 Mutual trust and support to ride
out tough times
 Scalable team architecture
 Resilient team culture
 Poised for growth
 Swappable components, no
single points of failure
(succession planning)
 Strong communication practice
 2-pizza teams
7. Resilient People and Team Architecture
‘Can Do’
attitude
Not Afraid to
Fail
A
Specialisation
Team First
Keen Learner
Resilient design is a complex and many-faceted paradigm
that involves long-term thinking about worst-case disaster
scenarios, as well as more common, everyday wear. Though
the variables which contribute to resilience are many, and
often complicated – the larger lesson is simple: buildings
need to be resilient in order to be truly sustainable – a
building needs to be able to stand the test time.
From: Resilient Design: Is Resilience the New Sustainability? | Inhabitat -
Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building
Resilient
individuals
building
resilient
team
Architectur
e

11. © 2015 Unitrends 11
8. High Performance, Infinitely Scalable Software
Architecture
From Highscalability.com on Design Principles of AWS S3

12. © 2015 Unitrends 12
Key Ingredients
1. Agile Software Architecture
2. Smart Management of Technical Debt
3. Automated Software Assurance Process
4. Always Delivering Value to Market
5. Data Driven Architectural Decisions
6. Differentiated Intellectual Property
7. Strong People and Team Architecture
8. High Performance and Infinitely Scalable Software
Architecture
Engineering an Entrepreneurial Architecture

13. © 2015 Unitrends 13
THANK YOU