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Agile Architecture in Swift
Over the last decade, I have worked as an iOS developer in many different teams. While basically all teams described themselves as being agile, it never felt so. For most, “agile” had become a meaningless word, just describing a marketing term for a certification industry.
But “agile” has meaning. Agility is the ability to respond to change rapidly. This means that all software projects start out agile, but we’ve all witnessed this ability decaying. But why does this decay happen? Why did management send all of you to expensive workshops so that you are certifiable agile, and still: It doesn’t feel agile? Your development speed is only accelerating in decreasing. Your team’s estimates are so off that it might be more useful to develop with random story points. Who is to blame, or what is to blame?
Maybe it is your architecture, the lack of it, or the multitude of half-baked architectural ideas in one codebase. I met a team that hadn’t been able to release a new version of their iOS app in response to breaking changes due to an OS update — even roughly a year after the initial developer preview and ten months after the public release. Yet the team would still describe them as agile, as they were employing certain techniques usually tagged “agile.” But wearing Air Jordans doesn’t transform you into Michael Jordan. Being able to buy a brush doesn’t make you Michelangelo…
