In short, the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized man

Secure software design, little and often This article provides clear and simple steps to help teams that want to adopt threat modelling. Threat modelling is a risk-based approach to designing secure systems. It is based on identifying threats in order to develop mitigations to them. With cyber security risk increasing and enterprises becoming more aware of their liabilities, software development t

Why an effective digital platform can help you scale delivery, what it should have in it, and how to get started building one. These days everyone is building a 'platform' to speed up delivery of digital products at scale. But what makes an effective digital platform? Some organisations stumble when they attempt to build on top of their existing shared services without first addressing their organ

CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that I first heard described by Greg Young. At its heart is the notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information. For some situations, this separation can be valuable, but beware that for most systems CQRS adds risky complexity. The mainstream approach people use for i

Capture all changes to an application state as a sequence of events. This is part of the Further Enterprise Application Architecture development writing that I was doing in the mid 2000’s. Sadly too many other things have claimed my attention since, so I haven’t had time to work on them further, nor do I see much time in the foreseeable future. As such this material is very much in draft form and

As I hear stories about teams using a microservices architecture, I've noticed a common pattern. Almost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up Almost all the cases where I've heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble. This pattern has led many of my colleagues to argue

The “Test Pyramid” is a metaphor that tells us to group software tests into buckets of different granularity. It also gives an idea of how many tests we should have in each of these groups. Although the concept of the Test Pyramid has been around for a while, teams still struggle to put it into practice properly. This article revisits the original concept of the Test Pyramid and shows how you can

The test pyramid is a way of thinking about how different kinds of automated tests should be used to create a balanced portfolio. Its essential point is that you should have many more low-level UnitTests than high level BroadStackTests running through a GUI. For much of my career test automation meant tests that drove an application through its user-interface. Such tools would often provide the fa