Building Evolutionary Architectures - Book review

In this blog, I want to speak about the book Building Evolutionary Architectures by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua. I have attended Neal's conference talk on this topic and heard from many other speakers about the fitness functions. That’s the reason I wanted to read and understand the concepts mentioned in the book.

As the title implies, the book talks about building evolutionary architecture. The question that the book trying to solve is, how do we make sure, our software architecture stays intact with the changing requirements? How do we build the system which can adapt to future needs or how do we know the decision that we are taking is not impacting the architecture of the system?

The book speaks about fitness functions, to solve this concern. An architectural fitness function provides an objective integrity assessment of some architectural characteristics. So, in a system there may be many characteristics that we want to measure, so you would write separate fitness functions for each of them. In the book, a fitness function is not defined in a concrete way but rather in an abstract form of graphs, tests or any other methods by which we know that our system is doing good with the change. This means you would still need to use your intellect not only to write the fitness function but also to make sense of them.

For me, the best thing about the book is, it provides software architects with a rich vocabulary to communicate their intentions behind their choices to a variety of audiences, including business stakeholders, teams, and engineering leadership. The book also gives you a survey of various architectural approaches. It also talks about some of the practical ideas on how do we implement evolutionary architectures I particularly like the focus on the organizational factors and how does it apply to the software architectures.

In conclusion, I would recommend this book to any software architect. Use it as your communication guide, use it to improve your vocabulary, use it to get a sense of what is happening across the industry, so that you could choose what best for your situation.

4 ways to contribute to the community for a software developer

If you are a software professional and looking for something new to start here are the 4 things to try for!

1. Attend a community event or user group gettogether or local meetup

2. Answer questions at the stackoverflow or contribute to support forums

3. Share your experience via blog or twitter or other forums with the community.

4. Contribute to opensource 

When to stay with modular monoliths over microservices

We have seen the developments in the microservices architecture maturing, where by more and more people are trying to evaluate the benefits before jumping on to the unknown trajectory.

In the talk titled When to stay with modular monoliths over microservices at Oracle Code, Bangalore, I tried to discuss these points. You can view the slides below.

When to stay with modular monoliths over microservices from Manu Pk

According to me, Over simplified version of decision tree come down to two criteria's, Business Context & Relative Scaling. I tried to explore the same in my presentation. As Martin Fowler puts it, you shouldn't start a new project with microservices, even if you're sure your application will be big enough to make it worthwhile.

Here is a link to the YouTube Recording of the session. Let me know what you think about these topics.

Practical communication strategies for software architects

Here is a video recording of my session titled Practical communication strategies for software architects on Bangalore software architect meetup.


The session covers communication ideas for various stages and to different stakeholders in a project scenario.

 

Practical communication strategies for software architects from Manu Pk


Have a look at the video recording of the session

An approach to help developers write meaningful tests

Over the last few years we have been adding unit tests to our existing product to improve its internal quality. During this period we always had the challenge of choosing unit-vs-Integration tests. I would like to mention some of the approaches we have applied to improve the quality of existing system.

At its core, unit testing is about testing a single component at a time by isolating its dependencies. The classical Unit tests have these properties "Fast, Independent, Repeatable, Self-Validating,Timely". Typically in java a method is considered as a unit. So traditional  (and most common) approach is to test the single method of a class separated from all its dependencies.

Interestingly there is no hard-core definition of "what makes a unit". Many times a combination of methods which spread across multiple classes can form a single behavior. So in this context the behavior should be considered as a unit. I have seen people breaking these units and writing multiple tests for the sake of testing a single method. If the intermediate results are not significant this will only increase the complexity of the system. The best way to test a system is to test with its dependencies where ever we can accommodate them. Hence we should try to use the actual implementation and not mocks. Uncle bob puts this point very well, "Mock across architecturally significant boundaries, but not within those boundaries." in his article.

If the software is build with TDD approach it might not be a challenge to isolate dependencies or adding a test for your next feature. But not all software's built like these. Unfortunately we have systems where there are only few or none of the test are written. When working with these systems we can  make use of the above principle and use tests at different levels. Terry Yin provides an excellent graphics (which is show below) in his presentation titled Misconceptions of unit testing. This shows how different tests can add values and what are its drawbacks.

Many of our projects uses Java and Spring framework. We have used springs @RunWith and SpringJUnit4ClassRunner to create AppLevel Tests which gives you the objects with all its dependencies initiated. You could selectively mock certain dependencies if you would like to isolate them. This sets a nice platform to write unit tests with multiple collaborating objects. we call them App level tests. These are still fast running test with no external dependencies. A different term was chosen to differentiate itself from the classical unit test. We also had Integration test which would connect with external systems. So, the overall picture of developer tests can be summarized as below,  

Tests	Naming convention	Runs at	When to use	Exec Time
Unit Test	Ends with Test	Every build	Rule based implementations where the logic can be tested in isolation	Few Milliseconds
App Level Tests	Ends with TestApp	Every build / Nightly builds (Teams choice)	Tests the service layers in connection with others. Frees you from creation of mock objects. Application context is loaded in the tests.	Few Seconds
Integration Test	Ends with TestIntg	Runs on demand when a special profile is used in build.	All the above + Use when you need to connect to external points like DB, web services etc..	Depends on the integration points.
Manually Running Tests	Ends withTestIntgManual	Manually running tests, Used debugging a specific problem locally	All the above - Can't be automated.	Depends on the integration points.

This approach gives the developers choose the right level of abstractions to test and helps in optimizing their time. Nowadays my default choice is App Level tests and I go to unit tests if I have a complicated logic to implement.

Further reading:

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html

http://blog.manupk.com/2011/11/when-to-replace-unit-tests-with.html

http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/03/05/TheStartUpTrap.html

http://codeofrob.com/entries/uncle-bobs-viewpoint-considered-harmful.html

http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2014/05/10/WhenToMock.html

http://bryanpendleton.blogspot.in/2015/04/on-testing-strategies-and-end-to-end.html
https://www.symphonious.net/2015/04/30/making-end-to-end-tests-work/
https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/mockists-are-dead-long-live-classicists

Do you need microservices architecture?

Over the last few years there has been lot of attention on microservices. After the initial "hype" we saw that what problems it solves and what it can not. I have tried to cover what are microservices and where it can be useful and where it is not. I want to share the guidelines which can be used to choose between a monolith and microservices.

I feel that one must answer the below questions before they choose a microservices architecture and it will be beneficial to you if the answer to these questions are "YES".

1. Does your services represents different business cases/domains..?

2. Does the services needs to be deployed and managed independently..?

3. Does different parts of the application has different scaling/Technology needs..?

A modular monolith can be transformed to a set of microservices in case the need arises. So, we should start with monolith when we are not sure about the future.

Do you need microservices architecture? from Manu Pk

I have spoken couple of times about the microdervices. In April 2016, I spoke at the Bangalore Software Architects Meetup on the topic "Do you need microservices architecture?". Later in 2017 April there was a brief introductory talk titled, Introduction to Microservices at the Microservices and Serverless event. I hope this post helps to complement the slides.

Introduction to Microservices from Manu Pk

Application Security for Java Developers

Security is a top priority item on everyone's checklist nowadays. In this post, I will introduce you to useful reference material that can help you get started with securing applications. I want to focus more on web applications built with Java related technologies.

1. Authentication and Authorization

When it comes to security the most fundamental concepts are Authentication and Authorization. Unless you have a strong reason you should be following a widely accepted framework for this purpose. We have Java EE Authentication and Spring Security to help us out in this context. I have worked with spring security in the past and it can be customized to suite your specific needs. 

2. Security in the Web Layer

In our application stack the web layer is most vulnarable to attacks. We have may established standard practices and detection mechanisms to minimize these risks. OWASP Top 10 list is a must have check point for security checks. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) mission is to make software security visible, so that individuals and organizations worldwide can make informed decisions about true software security risks.

3. API Security

With the rise of mobile applications and stronger browsers expressing functionalities using the API is more popular day by day. We need to follow the same security practices for the web layer. All the API requests should be authenticated and we should use the principle of least privilege. I found the presentation from Greg Patton in the AppSec EU15 titled The API Assessment Primer is a great start for API security validations. Two major points focused in his talk are,
Do not expose any operations that are not needed
Do not expose any data that is not required
Which is in line with the basic security principle of giving least privilege by default.

To authenticate the services, we can create simple token-based API authentication mechanism based OAuth2 standards. If the services expose any sensitive data, it is better to use https so that man-in-the-middle attacks can be avoided.

4. Validating the User Input

Be aware that any JavaScript input validation performed on the client can be bypassed by an attacker that disables JavaScript or uses a Web Proxy. Ensure that any input validation performed on the client is also performed on the server. Go through the OWASP and WASC checklist to identify the potential validations you need to do in your application.

Other Useful Reference Materials

1. A Security Checklist for Web Application Design

2. Java EE Security