As a system evolves, so does its architecture. The challenges for software teams are to make sure that changes are made in a coordinated and consistent manner to ensure the system stability and evolutivity. Software systems are complex entities composed of multiple subsystems that in turn are composed of multiple…

Zalando had to fight for survival. Retail being one of the sectors with the highest competition, players acting in that space have no choice but to reinvent themselves on a continuous basis. Zalando started in 2008 just a couple of days before the financial crisis, rapidly expanding in countries the…

“We need microservices.” That’s one sentence heard many times wondering if they are worth it, if we really need them, and whether organizations are ready for it. There has been so much waste in jumping on the bandwagon of microservices for the wrong or bad reasons, or without the correct…

MACH is about Quality Engineering. Endless debates about Microservices have gone in the last years talking about their definition, granularity, and best-practices. These discussions can even make us lose sight of the motivations for building Microservices in the first place. MACH appeared as a simple acronym standing for Microservices, APIs…

Building APIs at the high standard is challenging. While many people would argue they are doing APIs, they are simply exposing basic read and write operations in a CRUD mode. Quality Engineering APIs are much more than that, enabling business growth with an increased composability leveraging modularity. This article focuses…

“APIs, APIs, APIs.” An overused acronym with different meanings, that all circle back to the need of performing business transactions through technology interconnectivity. APIs were initially a technical library acting as a dictionary, but they are now the cornerstone of business exchanges required to survive in the digital ecosystem. Organizations…

“Build today for tomorrow.” That’s the challenge of architecting a business platform able to thrive in a digital ecosystem where opportunities must be rapidly captured and scaled. Organizations must be able to continuously adapt their offerings and operations in an evolving environment where software becomes, if not already being, the…

Structure is required for transformation. Like castles are built and renovated on stable structures, digital businesses require stable points of construction and evolution. But many existing IT systems lack them. And a major difference for a digital platform is the speed at which changes must be delivered, creating the need…

Toyota’s employees can stop manufacturing lines. The responsibility and costs involved are high, but that’s how teams are empowered to embed quality and fix defects as soon as possible. Delivering software has similarities with a manufacturing line and can also suffer from defects added by inadvertence during the process. But…