2024-08-21 Architectural Decision-Making Processes

Owned by Craig McNally
Last updated: Aug 21, 2024
2 min read
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TimeItemWhoNotes
1 minScribeAll
Florian Gleixner is next, followed by Marc Johnson
Florian is out, so Marc will take notes today from the recording.

Reminder:  Please copy/paste the Zoom chat into the notes.  If you miss it, this is saved along with the meeting recording, but having it here has benefits.

*Making architectural decisions of various scopesAll

We know that a project of this size is faced with architectural decisions of various sizes, ranging from things scoped very narrowly, which impact only one or a few modules/teams, to platform-wide decisions impacting almost everyone.  A one-size-fits all approach to making these decisions is unlikely to work well, and we've seen this already with the RFC process.  Let's enumerate the types/sizes of decisions we make, then try to identify the applicable processes for each.  If there are gaps, do we need to define additional processes or guidance for dev teams, and architects?

Types/sizes of technical decisions

  • Team/Module-specific 
    • Process:  ad-hoc/team-specific, sometimes with the help of SAs
    • Who:  typically make internally by dev teams
    • Example(s): 
      • Whether certain functionality is added to an existing module, or to a new module.
      • Technology choices - shared libraries, frameworks, etc., e.g. quartz timers, various npm packages
      • Storage layout, e.g. jsonb vs traditional relational tables, etc.
  • Problem-specific
    • Process:
    • Who:
    • Example(s):
      • Pub-sub/Event-driven communications 
      • Adoption of spring-way
  • Security-driven
    • Process:
    • Who:  Security Team
    • Example(s):
      • ...
  • Platform-level/Fundamental
    • Process:
    • Who: 
    • Example(s):
      • Eureka
      • Consortia support (ECS) and cross-tenant requests (possibly problem-specific)
  • UI architectural decisions
    • Process: A proposal or problem is brought to stripes-architecture, it's discussed, and a decision is made.
    • Who: Attendees of the stripes-architecture meeting
    • Example(s):
      • How GitHub actions are organized/implemented/used
      • Migration away from Yarn v1
Time PermittingAdditional RFC process feedback Tod Olson

From Tod in slack:

I think we want to be clear about what kinds of communication and coordination we need to facilitate. That is, what kinds of agreements do we need about how FOLIO behaves at the technical level. And where have we had problems because of not having common agreements or breaking those agreements.

Previous Notes:

  • What is covered by FOLIO technical governance and needs an RFC?
  • Want the remit to be as small as possible without causing problems, only cover the things that cause problems if they don't line up
  • Could lead to fewer RFCs
  • DRs were maybe a hack to cover things that are important but don't warrant RFCs
  • Some might get refined again
  • DRs process was intended to be more lightweight than what are RFCs are
  • For now have DRs still, RFCs just don't ouptut DRs

Today:

  • ...
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