How can you prioritize speed and quality in your application architecture?

In my experience, defining clear and detailed requirements is paramount for successful application architecture. One time at work, we faced challenges when the business team provided ambiguous requirements that led to frequent changes during development. To address this, we implemented a collaborative approach, involving stakeholders in business requirement collection workshops and using tools like user stories and epics. By clearly understanding functional and non-functional needs, we could make informed decisions, and set realistic expectations, ultimately improving speed and quality.

To prioritize speed and quality in your application architecture, define clear requirements, choose the right technology stack, adopt an agile approach, implement automated testing, conduct code reviews, optimize for performance, use CI/CD pipelines, design for scalability, implement robust monitoring, address technical debt, focus on UX design, collect user feedback, and hold regular retrospectives.

In my experience, applying design principles is instrumental in achieving a balance between speed and quality. At a company I worked for, adherence to SOLID principles significantly improved code maintainability. For instance, following the Single Responsibility Principle (S in SOLID) helped us create modular components, making it easier to understand, modify, and test code. Additionally, adopting design patterns like the Decorator pattern, we were able to dynamically add or alter behavior of objects without modifying their existing code. This allowed us to achieve a high degree of modularity and adaptability, contributing to the overall quality of the system.

I honestly believe that agile methodologies can lead to deliver value with speed and quality, but require: A) quality backlog B) trasnparent and shared to all roadmap A and B are dependent to each other. Stakeholders and product owner must make sure that the epics and features they input are clear to the team. They should engage the team so that the developers understand what is to be built, give high level estimations and understand the roadmap and the vision as much as possible. This way, the whole team is at the same page, developers embrace the product's vision and the work progresses more efficiently.

In my experience, adopting agile and lean methodologies has been pivotal in achieving a balance between speed and quality. At a previous organization, transitioning from a traditional waterfall model to Agile and more specifically following the Scrum framework, led to more frequent and predictable releases. By emphasizing collaboration and iterative development, we improved adaptability to changing requirements and reduced time-to-market. Daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning, and retrospective sessions became crucial components of our development process, fostering a culture of continuous development / continuous improvement mindset and ensuring both speed and quality in our deliverables.

One thing I have found useful is incorporating code reviews and refactoring as integral parts of the development process. Regular code reviews help identify issues early on, enabling prompt resolution and preventing the accumulation of technical debt. Additionally, scheduled refactoring sessions allow to address code smells and improve maintainability without disrupting ongoing development. By prioritizing these practices, the codebase will most likely remain clean, efficient, and aligned with evolving project requirements, contributing to sustained speed and quality.

Achieving a balance between speed and quality in application architecture can be exemplified by embracing microservices and micro frontend approach. By decomposing the application into small, standalone services or UI modules, development and deployment speed can be enhanced. Implementing continuous integration tools like Jenkins and robust testing frameworks such as JUnit, JEST ensures ongoing code quality. Furthermore, leverage containerization, like Docker, to ensure consistent deployment across diverse environments. This strategy facilitates agile development while upholding software excellence through automated testing and a modular architecture. It's not one rule work for all, rather very subjective to the requirements & constraints.

Besides following the steps from the above answers, might be a good ideea to have some blueprints and procedures to be checkmarked with their purpose being speed an quality. These steps to be followed, could also be implemented in automated tools or other CI/CD processes that you have in place.