Agile Enterprise Applications Manifesto

Throughout my career, I have witnessed many attempts to govern how enterprise applications are constructed with some being better than others. At some level, I think they are all an absymal failure in that they tend to focus on the process and artifacts over the values that should be held by software development communities...



What would happen if you were to throw out the formalized architecture steering board processes and were to embrace Agile approaches to governance? What would happen if architects and developers coming before your board had to testify publicly that they will adhere to the below values:
We will design and develop enterprise applications that:

• Other developers can easily debug and maintain


• We will create quality documentation that allows for new developers to understand flow and exception handling


• We will increase cohesion and reduce coupling at every opportunity


• Our design will allow for graceful degradation under extreme load


• We will implement and properly leverage Version Control


• Business logic will reside in the appropriate tier


• We will stay as current as possible with patches and vendor releases


• We will achieve balance when it comes to performance, security, usability and scalability


• We will ensure that our application can be and is properly tested even if this responsibility resides in another group