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The paved road

As an architect, I want to give my teams as much freedom as possible and trust them to take responsibility. Of course this should be balanced with the business and architectural goals. So how can you achieve this?

Let me explain on how I like to tackle this...

The paved road

The way I use to lead my teams in the right direction is through a ‘paved road’. This means I’ll provide them a default stack that is easy to use with a lot of benefits, tools, documentation, support, … that help them during there day-to-day job.

They can still go offroad if they want to, but I found out it is a good way to create alignment as much as possible without the teams losing their autonomy.

It is also a good way to avoid the ‘ivory tower architecture’ and it leaves space for experimentation and improvements.

Some things I typically provide as part of the paved road:

  • A default application architecture: a template solution, starter kit or code generator that helps you to setup a default architecture. For example if you want to create a new microservice, this default architecture will help you to do this in the right way
  • CI/CD setup: The necessary pipelines and workflows to help you build, test and release the application in an automated fashion
  • Security integration: Did you know that security is hard? And doing it right is even harder? Providing all the boilerplate that can help your team to fall in the pit of success is always great.

What do you think that can help your teams succeed?

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