Sonya Natanzon

Solution architect at Guardant Health

Sonya is a solutions architect at Guardant Health. Her passion is helping patients by building excellent software.

She has worked in a number of different industries, but she always returns to healthcare. In addition to building software, she enjoys building effective software teams and driving improvement in software development processes in this highly regulated industry.

Talk Session

It’s a Feature, Not a Bug: A Step-by-step Guide to Architectural Decisions

Have you ever had this argument about existing code: when someone is trying to prove to you that you have a bug, you are arguing that it is a feature, and both sides realize (after extensive archeological dig through existing documentation) that the reasons behind this code’s functionality have been lost to time?

The better question is not “Have you ever?”, but “How often have you had this argument?”. All architects experience this at one time or another, wondering what were the motivations for a decision, what were the assumptions or constraints at the time, and was there an explicit decision to begin with. While we all recognize how important decisions are in software architecture, we don’t often have a framework for identifying and making architectural decisions.

In this talk, I will introduce a step-by-step guide that will help you identify, frame and make decisions about your software architecture that will leave no room for “it’s a feature, not a bug” arguments.