Home > Articles > Software Development & Management > Architecture and Design

Top 10 Architectural, Organizational and Process Related Failures

Organization and process issues sometimes create the problem and at other times stand in the way of permanent fixes. Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher, authors of The Art of Scalability, offer a "Top 10" list of the most common architecture, organizational and process related failures in small, medium and large sized product groups.
Like this article? We recommend

When we created AKF Partners in 2007, our first handful of clients had their share of engineering, infrastructure and technology problems, but they also shared something else we were not expecting: organization and process issues that appeared to sometimes create the problem and at other times stand in the way of permanent fixes.

This insight, and the resulting collection of common cures (or recommendations) became the basis of our first book, The Art of Scalability.

This article is a view into some of the many points we make in The Art of Scalability.  While nowhere near a complete list, it represents a “Top 10” list of the most common architecture, organizational and process related failures in small, medium and large sized product groups.

Architectural Failures

1. Designing Implementations Rather Than Architecting Solutions — Which of the following approaches would you use to describe your product architecture?

  1. “We are a Java shop running GlassFish on Apache Felix with MySQL and MongoDB persistent storage.”
  2. “We have 3-tier architecture, divided by services into fault isolation zones with no synchronous communication between them. Our persistent storage tier is a combination of relational and NoSQL that uses native replication to horizontally shard data.”

The correct answer is “B”. Answer “A” better describes how a potential architecture is implemented or deployed on any given day, but it does not describe how the solution scales, fails or works. Any deployment attribute (programming language, operating system, database choice, hardware choice, etc.) will scale or fail dependent upon the way in which those systems interact. Properly architected solutions allow for components (implementations) to be replaced over time as the need arises. They do not rely on any given solution for scalability or availability.

2. Failing to Design for Failures — Everything fails. Hardware, software, datacenters, ISPs, processes, and people — especially people. When a system is architected correctly, and key services or customer segments are isolated into fault isolation zones, the effect (or blast radius) of any failure is contained and minimized. The failure of checkout functionality on ecommerce platforms should not bring down the ability to search, browse, and add products to a cart (which can then be purchased later). Extremely high usage by a “noisy” customer should not cause all customers to have a terrible experience.

3. Scaling Up Instead of Out — Many products still rely on a relational database (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.) as the primary persistent storage. Instead of taking the time to segment customers across many small databases (each hosting multiple customers for cost efficiencies), many companies still rely on larger, faster hardware to scale a monolithic system. This is “scaling up” and will eventually lead to higher costs per transaction and larger impacts upon failure as the company grows. Further, capital efficiency suffers, as the next larger system stays mostly idle for some time until it is fully utilized. In the extreme case, the largest system simply isn’t large enough, and your product fails (witness eBay circa 1999 or PayPal circa 2004).

4. Using the Wrong Tool (or Maslow’s Law) — Ask a carpenter to fix your toilet and he will bring a hammer. You probably won’t like the results. Similarly, ask someone whose primary area of expertise is a database to help with product architecture, and they are likely to incorporate a database. The relational database is still the king of persistent storage and is often the best fit for solutions requiring strict ACID compliance or data with inherent relationships (e.g. products that map organizational hierarchies, product catalog hierarchies, etc.). However, we now have many alternative options to create a polyglot persistence tier. If you have data that naturally exists in a document format, i.e. JSON, then a document store may be a better solution. Storing data in its natural state must always be counter balanced with the overhead of learning and supporting an additional technology.

Organizational Failures

5. Organizing by Function — In the past, when we still built and sold software, the role of functional managers was to isolate their function so as to avoid distractions and maximize functional work. This worked well when each team had a very specific role to perform, and the work was passed down a product assembly line. Today’s SaaS companies produce a service that changes rapidly mdash; often every two weeks but sometimes multiple times a day. This requires that the product manager speak with the engineers frequently and that the infrastructure engineers provide input before coding begins. Organizing by function blocks this communication, resulting in poor quality, slow time to market, low levels of innovation and conflict between the teams. Today’s best performing teams are multi-disciplinary, autonomous, and own a service from idea through development into support (what we call “cradle-to-cradle” for an evolving service). If you doubt this principle, ask yourself, “What do we do when there is a crisis?” Almost invariably, the answer is “grab people from different teams, put them in a room, and ask them to solve the problem.” If we do this when it’s important, why don’t we do it every day?

6. Creating Large Teams — Another major failure with scaling organizations is having too many people working on the same code base. When the team grows to more than 15 or 20 engineers, communication and coordination overhead starts to take a toll. Conflicts arise in resource scheduling (environments), merges and decision making. These conflicts take time away from producing more features for customers, which reduces value creation. Fault isolation for services (see item #2 under Architecture) can create natural separations in the product that eliminate these conflicts. It is fine for a team to own multiple services (login, registration, search) but no two teams should own the same service.

7. Failing to Tend Your Garden — We believe great managers are always seeding, feeding, and weeding their “garden” of employees. This means bringing on new talent (seeding), developing team members (feeding), and when necessary letting them go (weeding). To grow the best garden, you must tend it, which means constantly evaluating your team. We like to think about an employee’s performance across three axes: skill, growth, and behaviors. The skill category is how well they know and perform the role for which they were hired. If they are a Java engineer, how well do they code in Java? The growth category is whether they have the ability to grow beyond their current role. Are they ready to be a senior engineer? Are they capable of being an architect? Are they interested in being a manager? The final category, behaviors, is how well their actions are aligned to the company culture. This oft-overlooked category has the greatest potential for adverse effects on the team as a whole. The employee might be a great Java developer and capable of architecting a scalable system, but if their behavior impacts the remainder of the team, they are a weed that must be pulled.

Process Failures

8. Failing to Learn — Santayana’s Repetitive Consequences, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” is true for product organizations as well. We like to say, “An incident is a terrible thing to waste.” If your service is unavailable for a period of time and all you do is restore service and move on, you’ve wasted a terrific learning opportunity. Every failure should be seen as an opportunity to learn so as not to repeat past mistakes. This requires discipline to take the time to conduct a proper postmortem. If you think that the root cause of your outage was a hardware failure, you’ve missed the mark. Keep asking “why” until you have find root causes in the architecture, people, and process.

9. Implementing Agile as a Panacea — The Agile methodology is great, but it doesn’t solve problems with team structure (see items #5 and #6 in the Organization section) or business problems such as communication between the product and sales organizations. Training and coaching are a must to be successful in implementing Agile. Realizing that Agile is a business process and not just a software practice is even more important to achieving success. Finally, it’s important to understand that Agile can only fix the problems for which Agile was intended. Expecting it to fix predictability in meeting business expectations on specific dates for specific deliverables is like expecting a carpenter to fix your toilet (see #4 in Architecture).

10. Expecting Load and Performance Testing to Identify All Scale Issues — If your company depends on the system to perform on a single day such as cyber Monday or April 15th (tax day in the U.S.) then by all means you should perform load and performance testing (L&P). However, the problem with L&P is that it tests what happens when users behave exactly the way you’ve predicted they would behave. If your software doesn’t change, that’s a pretty effective way of testing. However, most companies’ software changes frequently, and therefore customer behavior changes. Customers run new reports with queries that take longer. They perform twice as many searches when you change the color of the search button. In a nutshell, their behavior is unpredictable. While L&P can be used to compare a baseline — how does this version compare to last version — it should not be expected to catch everything. Instead, if you have customers divided into fault isolation zones (see item #2 in Architecture), then you can roll out new software to a small subset of users and use actual customer behavior on the new software to test how it performs.

Marty Abbott and Mike Fisher are Managing Partners at AKF Partners, a scalability consulting company dedicated to helping companies grow. Their most recent book is the second edition of The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.

InformIT Promotional Mailings & Special Offers

I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from InformIT and its family of brands. I can unsubscribe at any time.

Overview


Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site.

This privacy notice provides an overview of our commitment to privacy and describes how we collect, protect, use and share personal information collected through this site. Please note that other Pearson websites and online products and services have their own separate privacy policies.

Collection and Use of Information


To conduct business and deliver products and services, Pearson collects and uses personal information in several ways in connection with this site, including:

Questions and Inquiries

For inquiries and questions, we collect the inquiry or question, together with name, contact details (email address, phone number and mailing address) and any other additional information voluntarily submitted to us through a Contact Us form or an email. We use this information to address the inquiry and respond to the question.

Online Store

For orders and purchases placed through our online store on this site, we collect order details, name, institution name and address (if applicable), email address, phone number, shipping and billing addresses, credit/debit card information, shipping options and any instructions. We use this information to complete transactions, fulfill orders, communicate with individuals placing orders or visiting the online store, and for related purposes.

Surveys

Pearson may offer opportunities to provide feedback or participate in surveys, including surveys evaluating Pearson products, services or sites. Participation is voluntary. Pearson collects information requested in the survey questions and uses the information to evaluate, support, maintain and improve products, services or sites, develop new products and services, conduct educational research and for other purposes specified in the survey.

Contests and Drawings

Occasionally, we may sponsor a contest or drawing. Participation is optional. Pearson collects name, contact information and other information specified on the entry form for the contest or drawing to conduct the contest or drawing. Pearson may collect additional personal information from the winners of a contest or drawing in order to award the prize and for tax reporting purposes, as required by law.

Newsletters

If you have elected to receive email newsletters or promotional mailings and special offers but want to unsubscribe, simply email information@informit.com.

Service Announcements

On rare occasions it is necessary to send out a strictly service related announcement. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance we might send users an email. Generally, users may not opt-out of these communications, though they can deactivate their account information. However, these communications are not promotional in nature.

Customer Service

We communicate with users on a regular basis to provide requested services and in regard to issues relating to their account we reply via email or phone in accordance with the users' wishes when a user submits their information through our Contact Us form.

Other Collection and Use of Information


Application and System Logs

Pearson automatically collects log data to help ensure the delivery, availability and security of this site. Log data may include technical information about how a user or visitor connected to this site, such as browser type, type of computer/device, operating system, internet service provider and IP address. We use this information for support purposes and to monitor the health of the site, identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents and appropriately scale computing resources.

Web Analytics

Pearson may use third party web trend analytical services, including Google Analytics, to collect visitor information, such as IP addresses, browser types, referring pages, pages visited and time spent on a particular site. While these analytical services collect and report information on an anonymous basis, they may use cookies to gather web trend information. The information gathered may enable Pearson (but not the third party web trend services) to link information with application and system log data. Pearson uses this information for system administration and to identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents, appropriately scale computing resources and otherwise support and deliver this site and its services.

Cookies and Related Technologies

This site uses cookies and similar technologies to personalize content, measure traffic patterns, control security, track use and access of information on this site, and provide interest-based messages and advertising. Users can manage and block the use of cookies through their browser. Disabling or blocking certain cookies may limit the functionality of this site.

Do Not Track

This site currently does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Security


Pearson uses appropriate physical, administrative and technical security measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

Children


This site is not directed to children under the age of 13.

Marketing


Pearson may send or direct marketing communications to users, provided that

  • Pearson will not use personal information collected or processed as a K-12 school service provider for the purpose of directed or targeted advertising.
  • Such marketing is consistent with applicable law and Pearson's legal obligations.
  • Pearson will not knowingly direct or send marketing communications to an individual who has expressed a preference not to receive marketing.
  • Where required by applicable law, express or implied consent to marketing exists and has not been withdrawn.

Pearson may provide personal information to a third party service provider on a restricted basis to provide marketing solely on behalf of Pearson or an affiliate or customer for whom Pearson is a service provider. Marketing preferences may be changed at any time.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information


If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your postal address or email address), we provide a way to correct or update that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done on the Account page. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer-service@informit.com and we will process the deletion of a user's account.

Choice/Opt-out


Users can always make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with certain services offered by InformIT. If you choose to remove yourself from our mailing list(s) simply visit the following page and uncheck any communication you no longer want to receive: www.informit.com/u.aspx.

Sale of Personal Information


Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020