Case Study: The New Guardian.co.uk

This was a very interesting war story by Erik Dörenburg and Matthew Wall, which was about how they have created a new version of the guardian.co.uk using a java web stack and agile development processes.

The interesting points were their idea of an architects role. They assumed a coaching role and only made a design decision when it was clear that a couple of teams had hit a similar problem and one of them had come up with a better technical solution. They were also strong proponents of Domain Driven Design, which forces everyone involved to use the same language for the same idea in the application up to the point training the end users in simple uml diagramming and teaching concepts such as inheritance and composition and then making the developers create components in the code that have the same name.

Both of these ideas can be found in Martin Fowler's books, who is the Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks, which is where Erik Dörnberg works. It sounds like to me then that, in this case, the consultant really earned his corn.