How can you maintain an easy-to-evolve system architecture?

Maintaining an easy-to-evolve system architecture is a key challenge for any software engineer. As your system grows in complexity, functionality, and users, you need to ensure that it can adapt to changing requirements, scale to meet demand, and perform reliably. In this article, you will learn some principles and practices that can help you design and evolve your system architecture in a sustainable way.

1 Modularize your system

One of the most important aspects of an easy-to-evolve system architecture is modularity. Modularity means dividing your system into smaller, independent, and cohesive components that communicate through well-defined interfaces. This allows you to isolate changes, reduce dependencies, reuse code, and test each component separately. Modularity also enables you to adopt different technologies, frameworks, and paradigms for different components, as long as they conform to the interface contracts.

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Mostafa Solati

Book Author | Creator of Kahroba Language | Golang Contributor
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Sometimes you may write a bad code due to the pressure of the business and lack of time. It's inevtible but there is something you can do to avoid spreading the bad code through the whole system and that's modularizatiin. By decoupling your code logics, later you can throw a part of the code out of the window and rewrite it without affecting the whole syatem. With a good modular system you can break down the whole system into the microservice architecture. There are lots of benefits in modularity while the only benefit of not having a modular system is a perfect spaghetti!

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Emanuel Zhupa

Senior Software Engineer | Design thoughtfully
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Modularity it’s important but it’s also easy to mess around, and to mix and match concepts, most devs take this literally and choose micro-services architecture to apply this rule, but most of the times it’s an overkill

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Garen Yöndem

Lead Backend Engineer @ Afiniti
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Modularization and separation of concerns are always good. But you shouldn't get ahead of yourself. Keep it dead simple is also a well known software engineering term. Always deliver for what you have, never design a system for 1mil customers while you have ten.

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2 Apply design patterns

Design patterns are proven solutions to common problems that arise in software design. They provide guidelines and best practices for structuring, organizing, and interacting with your system components. Design patterns can help you achieve goals such as loose coupling, high cohesion, separation of concerns, abstraction, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Some examples of design patterns are MVC, observer, factory, singleton, and decorator. You should use design patterns wisely and appropriately, not as a one-size-fits-all solution.

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3 Refactor your code

Refactoring is the process of improving the quality of your code without changing its functionality. It involves applying techniques such as renaming, extracting, simplifying, and reorganizing your code to make it more readable, maintainable, and extensible. Refactoring can help you eliminate code smells, reduce complexity, enhance performance, and fix bugs. You should refactor your code regularly and incrementally, using tools such as code analyzers, linters, and formatters.

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Emanuel Zhupa

Senior Software Engineer | Design thoughtfully
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I disagree with the frequency regularly, I don’t think that quality of code, should be maintained this frequently, that’s why we have code reviews for, most of the problems should be detected on PR period. And also, even if you don’t do it on PR level, every time you have to work with something un-optimized, you do the fix and the refactoring on one go.

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4 Document your architecture

Documentation is essential for maintaining an easy-to-evolve system architecture. Documentation can help you communicate your design decisions, assumptions, trade-offs, and constraints to other developers, stakeholders, and users. Documentation can also help you review, evaluate, and improve your architecture over time. You should document your architecture at different levels of detail and abstraction, using diagrams, models, specifications, and comments. You should also keep your documentation up-to-date and consistent with your code.

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5 Use version control

Version control is a system that tracks and manages the changes made to your code over time. It allows you to create, compare, merge, and revert different versions of your code, as well as collaborate with other developers. Version control can help you maintain an easy-to-evolve system architecture by enabling you to experiment with new features, fix bugs, refactor code, and deploy changes safely and reliably. You should use a version control system such as Git, SVN, or Mercurial, and follow best practices such as branching, tagging, and committing.

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6 Test your system

Testing is the process of verifying that your system meets the specified requirements and behaves as expected. Testing can help you maintain an easy-to-evolve system architecture by ensuring that your system is functional, reliable, secure, and performant. Testing can also help you identify and fix errors, defects, and vulnerabilities in your code, as well as improve your code quality and coverage. You should test your system at different levels, such as unit, integration, system, and acceptance, using tools such as frameworks, libraries, and tools.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How can you maintain an easy-to-evolve system architecture?

1

2

3

4

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1 Modularize your system

2 Apply design patterns

3 Refactor your code

4 Document your architecture

5 Use version control

6 Test your system

7 Here’s what else to consider

Systems Design

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How can you maintain an easy-to-evolve system architecture?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 Modularize your system

2 Apply design patterns

3 Refactor your code

4 Document your architecture

5 Use version control

6 Test your system

7 Here’s what else to consider

Systems Design

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