Architecture Kata

Musicians play long hours to master their skills, athletes spend hours in gym, programmers code till the dawn, they all practice to master their skills. How does the architect become an expert? Architectural Kata is a meeting in a form of a workshop, during which, participants will have the opportunity to design the architecture of an imaginary system. In the real world, we rarely encounter, on a daily basis, the situation in which we can create the architecture of the system from scratch. There are a lot of courses and books where you can gain or expand your knowledge in this field, but there are not many opportunities to practice you architecture skills. Architectural Kata is an exercise that helps understand what the meaning of software architecture is for various people, what forces influence the design of the the system, how the decisions, taken at an early stage of the project impact final system design and how important it is to understand the assumptions and limitations of technology. We will also experience how vital to our skills is the communication with the team members. During the meeting, you will have the opportunity to work in a group, where you will create the system architecture for an imaginary problem. After presenting the concept of the product, you will be divided into groups of 3 or 4, and you'll get 90 minutes of time to create the architecture. After 90 minutes you will have to present your architecture to the whole group, to justify the choice of the technology and to defend your decision till the "last drop of blood." If you are interested in a retrospective of such workshops you can blog post at