Next Up

One way or another, you’ll pay for your architecture either through up-front design or downstream rework. In this chapter, you learned how to use risk to plan our design activities. Risks can help us decide how much work to do up-front. We can also use risk to decide which design mindsets to adopt.

One of the first risks many teams face on a new software system, even if it’s only new to you, is understanding who the software is meant to help. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to embrace the understand mindset by developing empathy for the humans who benefit from the software you develop. When you can walk in your stakeholders’ shoes, you’ll get a deeper understanding of their actual needs. Understand stakeholders’ real needs, and you improve your chance of solving the right problem.