Knowing the limitations of an architecture is the key to preventing technical debt

Monolithic applications. Microservices.

There are different types of architectures and they all have their pros and cons. Believing that one type of architecture ONLY has advantages and no disadvantages is not going to help your team and your organization.

For instance, the microservice architecture has a lot of advantages, but if you don’t understand the microservice to microservice dependencies, it can easily get out of control and it becomes a disadvantage.

When pros and cons of a specific approach are summarized at the beginning of a given project, what gets forgotten is noting down the disadvantages and making sure that they don’t turn into technical debt for your tech teams.

It is very acceptable to have limitations in your architecture or a specific part of your system as there is not such thing as perfect architecture. We are always on the path to achieve that architecture elegance and staying on that path without reaching the perfect elegance is a norm in software engineering dynamic environment.

Now it is time to review your architecture and note down these limitations and put checks and balances around them in order to prevent these limitations turning into technical debt and spreading through the healthy components of your architecture. Knowing and controlling your limitations is the key to preventing technical debt.

Thank you for reading.

Almir Mustafic