engineering teams

from Africa Surveyors May-June digital issue 2020

How to Decide on Software Architecture Modifications

Bentley Systems supports remote civil engineering teams

Infrastructure and civil design projects are essential for the functioning of cities and roadways, and urgent repair and redesign projects simply cannot wait out a pandemic. Bentley Systems, makers of comprehensive software for design, constructions and operations of infrastructure aims to support those working on crucial infrastructure projects, especially those who are working remotely. To do this, Bentley has announced that it will be opening up ProjectWise 365 to new users by waiving subscription fees through the end of September 2020.

ProjectWise 365 is a Microsoft Azurebacked cloud solution for infrastructure design collaboration, and allows users and stakeholders to share information, conduct collaborative design reviews, simplify transmittals, and RFIs ad to help with issue resolution. Rather than sharing PDFs via file sharing or through several disconnected applications, ProjectWise 365 keeps everything in one place, streamlining communication even when users are apart.

Helping infrastructure work continue during COVID-19

To protect and support their colleagues during the COVID-19 outbreak, organizations around the world have shifted quickly to working from home situations. During a press briefing, industry experts discussed how Bentley Systems’ civil design technology is helping the industry to better manage working remotely and to redefine how professionals design and build infrastructure projects.

In a briefing, Bentley’s Vice President of Civil Engineering, Francois Valois, highlighted that despite the current pandemic, there was still a significant amount of infrastructure work being done, with some states even increasing their work because streets are emptier than usual.

“In the U.S., we can see that a lot of states have kept ‘business as usual’ and have still allowed roadway construction to happen. Even some states are accelerating this. So for example, Florida, last week announce that they will invest $2.1B in extra funding this year to accelerate some projects.”

The challenge, however, is that work sometimes needs to be done with fewer people onsite, there needs to be less manual work, which is what has driven Bentley Systems ProjectWise 365 announcement, says Valois.

“We can no longer interact around a printed plan, and be pointing at each other on the plan. We have to find new ways to work” “Our answer to that is the digital twin for transportation. And with this technology concept we are helping our users who are ‘going digital,’” added Valois.

Mo Harmon, Director of Industry Strategy at Bentley Systems said one of the major goals of opening up ProjectWise 365 is to allow for the creation, collection, and sharing of data on dispersed teams.

“Some key issues facing the construction industry is the lack of productivity and safety on the jobsite. Now contractors are faced with making decisions on what critical staff really need to be physically on the job. And then, with that change, how are they going to get data back and forth to the site ad to their home base,” said Harmon.

Andy Kaiyala, Vice President of Engineering at Lane Construction spoke to how important it is to be able to move that data effectively.

“Anything we are tracking with an Excel spreadsheet means that we are behind our best competitors,” said Kaiyala.

iTwin Partner Program

At the same time as the ProjectWise 360 announcement, Bentley Systems discussed

ProjectWise 365 enables an immersive, web-based 2D/3D hybrid review environment, designed to help teams streamline coordination and resolve issues.

their iTwin Partner Program where they plan to invite third-party developers to work with them to further integrate their tools.

“The developers could be startups or more established software vendors who want to collaborate and work with us,” said Valois. “If they are successful, we are successful, and ultimately the industry wins. That’s what we’re about – making sure that were are going to go all together in advancing infrastructure.

Bentley Systems shared that they are hoping to work with industry leaders in their own domains, whether that is in construction or operations. Their goal is to help to make sure that data flows not only between Bentley tools, but through other third-party software. This parallels the similarly agnostic approach that Digital Construction Works has adopted in connecting existing workflows in more efficient ways.

“We build those integrations, but we also want others to come to the party and help,” said Valois.

“We will work with these startups in and collaborate with them closely because they can create very significant and disrupting innovations that will basically change the world and the way we work forever,” added Valois.

How to Decide on Software Architecture Modifications

Throughout the software development lifecycle, the foundational decisions that define a product’s architectural design impact every aspect of the application, so the process of modifying that architecture requires extensive analysis and consideration.

This topic crops up on a regular basis at every company. Most of the time, you’ll have an existing architecture that needs to be rewritten or refactored. Using these situations, you can quickly learn to pinpoint what to analyze, how to analyze it, and how to appropriately act on the findings.

When choosing to refactor or rewrite an application’s software architecture, or to understand when it’s completely unviable, use the following considerations.

Refactoring vs. Rewriting

For the sake of clarity, here’s how we differentiate between rewriting and refactoring.

Refactoring, according to Martin Fowler, is about changing the design of something without impacting its behavior. It’s generally a reorganization process that results in higher quality code.

A rewrite is like a nuclear football: hitting that switch requires heavy, careful consideration because it’s usually the most expensive option and slows down timeto-market

or the delivery of new features.

Factors Driving Architectural Decisions

Architecture is influenced by three major drivers that should always play a key role in an organization’s decision to refactor or rewrite it: business drivers, quality attributes and risks.

Business drivers are usually related to the direction of the company and its overall mission or vision. An example of a business driver is a need to create 10 new integrations a month, or perhaps 5,000 integrations by the end of the year. Another is an expected incremental increase in users or a boost in sales orders.

Quality attributes are aspects of the software that require protection, such as maintainability, accessibility, resilience, agility, security, and performance, to name a few. Organizations should define which quality attributes are most important to the business because adjusting one is usually detrimental to another. For instance, enhancing a product’s security can result in performance drop-offs, and improving an application’s resilience might result in longer deployment cycles.

The final drivers, risks, include things like slow time-tomarket, market competition, or financial risks related to the software’s user base. Again, organizations should decide which risks pose the biggest threat to the software’s success and trade them off against the lesser threats to better analyze their software architecture for its capability to mitigate these risks.

Consideration of all of these drivers is an essential part of the decision-making process, both when defining architecture from the start of a project and analyzing the need to refactor or rewrite an existing application. If any drivers are still relevant or have created a positive impact on the business, then any planned modifications must take those facts into account.

Soft Changes and Rigid Changes

After analyzing the relevance of drivers for architecture modifications, it’s important to look for any gaps in the source code and ensure that important quality attributes are protected. On a deeper level, perhaps there is a lot of technical debt to deal with, or coding standards are not as high as they could be. We call these examples “soft” changes, which means they are easy to adjust and there is no need for foundational modifications to the source code.

If, on the other hand, there are many instances where the architectural source code fails to align with the business drivers or quality attributes, then the necessary changes are “rigid,” which translates to difficult, timeconsuming and risky.

If organizations can categorize the findings in their analysis in terms of this scale of rigidness, it becomes easier to decide what to do with the application.

As a rule of thumb, if the architecture is very rigid and any changes would have no noticeable impact on the business, it’s best to do nothing. However, if changes to the architecture are soft or easy to implement, but the business impact of any changes is still low, companies should consider tweaking it on a sprint-by-sprint basis to improve it in small chunks and measure the impact after each sprint. Things change when the business impact is higher. In these cases, if the architectural changes are soft, then it’s highly recommended to refactor the application, but when rigid changes are necessary then it’s often worth considering a full rewrite from scratch.

To summarize, when evaluating the health of an application’s architecture, engineers need to consider many things to decide on modifications, from issues with the tech stack and unprotected quality attributes to elements that play no role in achieving business goals. By evaluating the viability and severity of these changes, it becomes much easier to assess the difficulty of any modifications from a technical perspective and analyze the potential impact they will have on the business.

Sebastian Velez is head of technology and also oversees PSL’s training and development program and R&D innovation lab. He has been in the industry for more than a decade, with experience as a developer, software architect, scrum master and college professor.