For six years, I’ve had the privilege of working with Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble on the “State of DevOps Report,” which has collected data from more than 30,000 respondents. One of the biggest revelations for me was the importance of software architecture: high-performing teams had architectures that enabled developers to quickly and independently develop, test, and deploy value to customers, safely and reliably.
Decades ago, we could joke that software architects were expert only at using Visio, creating UML diagrams, and generating PowerPoint slides that no one ever looked at. If that were ever true, that is certainly not the case now. These days, businesses win and lose in the marketplace from the software they create. And nothing impacts the daily work of developers more than the architecture that they must work within.
This book fills a gap, spanning theory and practice. In fact, I think only a handful of people could have written it. Cornelia Davis is uniquely qualified, having spent years as a PhD student studying programming languages, having developed a love of functional programming and immutability, working for decades within large software systems, and helping large software organizations achieve greatness.