Software architecture is one of the things in software development that is important. At least that is what many people – especially software architects – claim: It is about the “important decisions”, the “decisions that are hard to change later”, and so on.

This post sort of complements the “Simplify!” blog series as it also points towards the simplification of the IT landscape. Still, based on a different train of thought, I decided to make it an independent post.

When I look around, I see two evolutions that in combination worry me a lot:

In the previous post, I discussed several relevant drivers that lead to ever-increasing complexity of the IT landscape, creating layers over layers of technology over time that never get cleaned up. As the post would have become too long otherwise, I left out the mitigation options.

In the previous post, I discussed several drivers of accidental complexity on the implementation level and what we can do about it.