Rethinking software governance: Reflecting on the second edition of Building Evolutionary Architectures

Building Evolutionary Architectures was published in 2017. In it, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Pat Kua defined and developed the concept of "evolutionary architecture" and demonstrated how it can help organizations manage change effectively in fast-moving business contexts and an ever-shifting technology landscape.

The book has now been updated, with its second edition due to be published in December 2022. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Rebecca and Neal talk to Birgitta Böckeler and Scott Shaw about the new edition and discuss how seeing various applications of evolutionary architecture over the last five years has led them to identify new issues and challenges. In particular, they talk about how the new edition takes up the question of automating architectural governance using fitness functions, and what this means for the way we build and maintain complex software systems.