Humane assessment is a versatile and generic method. That is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it can be applied in many situations. The weakness is that it is perceived to be too distant from concrete scenarios that development teams face.

To bridge the perception gap, I have started to look since a couple of years for classes of problems that are concrete enough to be directly applicable. The first one is that of steering agile architecture for which I designed a 2-day course.

The concept of architecture started to regain traction recently. For example, two new industrial conferences were launched recently on the subject [1] [2]. That’s a good thing.

However, there are still quite some open questions as to how architecture fits within agile development. Of course, the main focus still tends to be placed on how to create architecture, and less about how to deal with the existing one. Humane assessment fills the latter space quite well. Specifically, the daily assessment process helps teams to make architecture concerns explicit and keep track of what goes on in the system. That is why the course is not about good or bad architecture. It’s about knowing the real architecture of your software system, and choosing to how to steer based on that reality.

If you are interested in working with me, please drop me an email.

Here is a teaser video.