Director and software architect, Thoughtworks

Neal Ford

Ford introduced architectural fitness functions and, with Mark Richards, framed architecture as the disciplined analysis of trade-offs.

Essential reading: Building Evolutionary Architectures
Fundamentals of Software Architecture
Software Architecture: The Hard Parts
Models in this guide: 4

No. 033Trade-offs & Economics
Everything Is a Trade-off
There are no best practices, only trade-offs in context. If you can't name the downside, you don't understand the choice.
No. 053Change & Evolution
Fitness Functions
Protect the qualities that matter with automated checks, so the architecture can change safely.
No. 109AI Systems
Evals as Fitness Functions
AI behaviour is probabilistic and shifts with every model, prompt and data change, so check quality with automated evaluations on real cases, run on every change and tracked over time.
No. 125From the Masters
Why Is More Important Than How
The second law of software architecture: a design only makes sense once you know why it was chosen.