Shadowing Practice: What Software Architecture Should Look Like • Dave Farley • GOTO 2022 - Learn English Speaking with Video

Wikipedia defines software architecture as the functional structures of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems.

Well you can kind of see what they mean

but it's a pretty dry definition and it raises as many questions as it really answers.

After all, what does fundamental mean anyway?

And for that matter, what does structure mean in this context too?

The last bit is really only saying architecture is produced by a disciplined approach to architecting things.

To be fair to Wikipedia, this is a difficult idea to nail down.

Even though I think that most of us would agree that it's an important one in some way.

So here is my take on software architecture.

What does it mean and what does it take to do a good job of it?

Hi, I'm Dave Farley of Continuous Delivery.

Welcome to my channel.

If you haven't been here before, please do hit subscribe.

And if you enjoy the content today, hit like as well.

My thinking on software development, design and architecture is deeply informed by what I think of as an engineering approach.

I describe this generally applicable approach in my new book, Modern Software Engineering.

It's doing rather well in the rankings on Amazon at the moment, and he's collecting some very nice reviews.

So do check it out.

There's a link to that in the description below too.

I think of myself as a software developer.

Probably more accurately these days, I'm a consultant first and a developer second.

But I also spent a considerable part of my career being called a software architect in one form or another.

I couldn't then and can't now tell you any significant difference in my focus between the times

when I was called a developer and the times when I was called an architect.

Ultimately, I think this is about design.

Maybe it's about design at different scales, but I confess that I'm rather skeptical of that.

The slippery nature of defining architecture as design on a bigger scale is that design in information systems is kind of fractal.

There are things that matter at all levels of detail

and there are tiny details that will invalidate grand assumptions

and there are grand assumptions that can prevent effective progress at the level of tiny detail.

A popular description of software architecture comes from Grady Booch who says architecture represents the significant design decisions

that shape a system where significance is measured by cost of change.

I don't disagree with this definition but I don't like it very much it implies

that these are the details

that we need to get right at the start to succeed it makes some sense

if we're looking retrospectively at a system

but it's a pretty poor guide to building one be omniscient for something this complex

that simply isn't going to happen for me there's only one approach to architecture that makes any sense at all.

It has to be an evolutionary process.

We will guide the design of our system by modifying the constraints that we apply to that design.

These constraints or rules of the road are what we think make sense at any given point.

These form an important aspect of our architecture.

We create a kind of tourist map of the system that we can use as a tool to guide design choices.

Here's the tourist map from one of my systems.

This map guides the evolution of the system in the direction of the outcomes that we aim to achieve.

If we're doing a good job we'll discover our inevitable mistakes and update our tourist map as our understanding deepens.

Let's try and walk into this problem a little bit more carefully.

One great definition of software architecture is it's the stuff that we wish we'd got right at the start of a project.

perhaps a little more helpfully it's the shared understanding

that the expert developers have of the system design both of

these definitions come from ralph johnson i'd add a couple of

words to the second it's a snapshot of the shared understanding

of the expert developers you hope it doesn't change too often

but you should expect it to change i think that in combination these definitions get something rather important right.

At the start of any project, we don't yet know the answers, but we still need to make some guesses about what may work in order to begin.

If we're going to be creating this system as part of a team, we need a way to discuss design ideas to communicate with each other about the system

and think about where different behaviours of the system will be handled.

Our tourist map will help a lot with these conversations.

Debating new features in front of the tourist map can we can explore the implications of our design choices

and maybe spot improvements or mistakes in the map.

I like Ralph Johnson's focus on the stuff we wish we

got right rather than a focus on the stuff we must get right.

We focus on the stuff that worry us.

I like it because we almost certainly won't get it right first time but it is important stuff.

That aligns very nicely with my thinking

and my approach to development in general really which is significantly focused on maintaining my freedom to get things wrong.

That probably sounds a bit weird but I want the freedom to make a mistake

and the ability to learn and recover from it.

For that we need the ability to contain the complexity and to manage it.

Fundamentally the architecture of our system is realized in the shapes that we make with our code.

All software has an architecture.

in some of them though it happened by accident in others it was worked on with great care

and grew to be something good good architecture allows us to

isolate one part of the problem from another this could be functional let's create services aligned with bounded context

so that they can change more independently of one another

or it could be in the jargon of architects non-functional let's shard the data in our system

so that it can scale linearly as demand rises

more formal approaches to architecture often discuss architectural measures of quality

this is the list from ISO I can see how talking about the illities of a system can help

but in reality I don't really buy into the idea of non-functional requirements very much

inside every non-functional requirement is a feature of the system that users care about If not, why are we doing it at all?

Even something as seemingly self-centered as making our code maintainable is

really about ensuring our ability to continue to deliver value to our users in the future.

These things, security, performance, scalability, testability, deployability, resilience, and so on,

are behaviors of our system as much as taking payment with a credit card.

We have to design the system to exhibit these behaviours.

If we are sensible, we will design our system to manage the complexity of these things by compartmentalising them from other behaviours where we can.

The reason that people get worried about these kinds of qualities of a system

and try to teach them somewhat differently is that they tend to have a broader impact than many features.

can't usually fix security or scalability or resilience in a single place in your system.

These are often referred to as cross-cutting concerns but that doesn't mean

that these things are architectural concerns and other things are not.

These are just behaviors that people often forget about while chasing other kinds of features.

Whether you call yourself an architect or not and and whether you work in a big team or alone, for any given piece of software,

you need to decide how it should behave.

And that means how you process credit cards or what color your buttons are, as well as is it okay to leak money to attackers

or fall over when there are more than three people using it.

This is our responsibility as software developers.

For some types of systems, some of these problems are genuinely difficult And it helps a lot when you have smart,

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experienced people on the team who have seen ways to cope before.

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But that doesn't mean that architecture is somebody else's problem.

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Whether you are in your first day on the job or a grizzled veteran, your decisions may impact on the architecture of the system.

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This is another of those slippery aspects of software.

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There is very little distance between what looks like a small change and that small change having a massive impact.

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In fact, the only things between that being true are luck

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or a good working design and architecture that we understand and can use to guide our fine grained decisions.

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So that gives us another step forward in understanding this complex concept a little better.

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The architecture of our software is the collection of constraints

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that we agree to adopt and maintain that will provide us some protection from making dumb mistakes.

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My preference is to engage every developer, whatever their experience in architectural discussions,

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allowing everyone to develop their own understanding of the architecture and to contribute to it as development proceeds.

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Architect as a job description has seen a bit of a decline in recent years.

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This is mostly in response to agile development's reaction against big upfront design.

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The problem with this is, as Dave Thomas famously said, big upfront design is dumb, no upfront design is dumber.

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So we need to start somewhere, but where?

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The real answer is that you make a guess based on your understanding of the problem so far and your experience.

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If you're any good at this kind of thing, you try to treat this guess as an experiment.

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How could you show that your guess is wrong.

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Try that.

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Working incrementally, whether in fine-grained design or big picture architecture, is essential to doing a good job of anything complex.

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There's a caveat to this, but as ever, you need to understand the trade-offs.

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If the problem that you are solving is pretty common, then you could adopt a tried and tested architectural approach,

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an off-the-peg architecture if you like.

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This is a good idea as long as you understand the constraints and the fit of that architecture to your problem.

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Because the other big problem with software architecture as an idea is that there's no one size fits all.

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There's no such thing as a generically good architecture.

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Rather it's a matter of whether a particular architecture fits the needs of the system.

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one of the most successful widely applicable architectures was a layered

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system backed up by a relational database something like this a ui some logic

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and a database for systems with a moderate number of users

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and relatively simple crud style features this was a very good choice i think

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that one of the reasons it was a good choice though is quite informative i think a principal reason

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that the clever but slow idea of transactions in relational databases took hold was

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because it allowed programmers to write multi-user systems without worrying too much about the horrible complexity of concurrency.

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If you open a transaction, read some data, change it, and write it out again, the database will block any other access to that data

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while you're dealing with it and as long as

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that as long as your transaction lasts it locks access to the data this was very good

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if this architecture fit your problem it kept the programming model simple it's still good

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if it fits your problem today and it fits quite a lot of problems quite well

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however as the web grew in influence

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and massive scale computing became more common having a relational database management system as a synchronization point to your data,

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a source of truth, simply didn't scale.

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So people started experimenting with other approaches.

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I was once asked to consult on a huge project.

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They had decided to use a NoSQL database as their primary data store,

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which is fine, but they'd forgotten or didn't realize the importance of the protection

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that transactions that they were more accustomed to had given them.

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This NoSQL database wasn't transactional.

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So data was shared by multiple processes and written to by multiple processes and the results were essentially random.

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Whoever wrote last got to store their changes.

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Everyone else would lose theirs and without any indication of the loss.

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It made me feel a bit queasy just to think about this big system with all the data shared

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and no protection or coordination between concurrent processes.

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This was a problem of not really thinking about the architecture of the system but only the tools.

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That's not the same thing.

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A collection of tools alone doesn't make a software architecture.

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This team had seen one of the big web companies develop

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this great looking NoSQL database to help them scale up and it did that,

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but only in the context of a whole raft of other choices and constraints that this team hadn't thought to apply.

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There is another somewhat similar very common mistake that probably is a little closer to your own software.

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Microservices were invented to decouple development.

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They're intended to be independently deployable, freeing teams to work separately from other teams,

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which means you don't get to test them together before you release.

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If you are Netflix or Amazon, this is fantastic.

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If you are a small development shop with a handful of developers, it's almost certainly overkill and so pretty inefficient.

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And worse than that, most teams that I see that claim to practice microservice approach aren't.

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They don't have independently deployable services, which means that they have to test them all together before they feel confident to release them.

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This is in fact a distributed monolith, which is a rather complex choice, good for some things, but never simple.

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I think that software is more complicated than we often think.

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So the sensible thing is to approach it with a little bit more caution.

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I don't mean that we should agonise for weeks or months before taking the first step, completely the opposite in fact,

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but we should work on the assumption that our best guess so far is almost certainly wrong.

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So architect our systems to allow us to recover when we learn more and find out where it's wrong.

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This takes skill, certainly, but it is realistically the only sensible choice in my opinion.

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Architecting a complex system is not something that someone in an ivory tower does at the start of a project.

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It's also only partly intentional.

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Like more fine-grained design decisions, it's an iterative incremental exercise in a kind of guided evolutionary process.

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This is not terribly precise, and sometimes, even despite cleverness, expertise, and experience, people get things wrong.

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That is, I am afraid, an inevitable consequence of dealing with something as tricky and complex as software.

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A few years ago, a performance optimization strategy in Intel processors meant that encryption could be broken,

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obviating all of the clever security architecture features in the web, cloud, on-premises systems, even mobile devices, and on pretty much every operating system.

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That is a salutary lesson in how fragile architecture and design can be to tiny things.

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a good way to approach this is to think about the things

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that you are unsure of I was chatting to my friend Kevlin Henney a few days ago

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and we were talking about design he said as soon as

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someone says I don't know there's a seam in the design

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that's quite a good way to think start the design of

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your system with your best guesses based on what you know

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so far and be on the look at for the things that you don't know or are unsure about.

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You don't have to do a depth first exploration of these things.

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In fact, you shouldn't.

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But you do think about how to insulate the stuff that you do understand from the things that you don't.

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Crude sketches in code of those things that you don't yet understand

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and abstraction can act as placeholders while you make progress

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and grow your understanding for the bits of the code that you do know.

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Don't build world-class security into the first sketches of your system.

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Don't take on the burden of making your system perfectly scalable from day one, but do design your system as best as you can imagine

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so that you will be able to enhance security without undoing the progress

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that you've already made and that you can take advantage of your great work

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so far and allocate it differently so that it does scale up if that's a demand.

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Insulate the parts of the system that you understand well from those that you don't yet.

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These kinds of design approaches are at the heart of what I describe in my modern software engineering book.

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Using the techniques to manage complexity, to give you a chance to go back and enhance or even correct architecture missteps when you discover them.

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When we built our exchange at LMAX, we had three different fundamental attempts at the basic architecture of our system.

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But because we'd taken an incremental approach to its design, only a small part of our effort was lost on each change.

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My final piece of advice on software architecture is to aim to be intentionally a little bit vague about the detail.

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Architecture should guide our decisions with constraints,

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but in great architecture there are actually relatively few constraints but those that are there are pretty rigidly enforced.

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Thank you very much for watching.

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Thank you.

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180 sentences

Speaking Goals for This Clip: Mastering Complex Ideas with Clarity

This video is perfect for English learners aiming to discuss abstract topics—like software architecture—with confidence. It targets fluency milestones such as explaining nuanced concepts, using academic vocabulary naturally, and structuring arguments. Whether you’re prepping for IELTS speaking practice or want to sound more professional, this clip helps you move beyond basic phrases to express complex thoughts clearly.

Phrase Bank: Reusable Expressions for Smart Conversations

"raises as many questions as it answers" – Great for pointing out unclear definitions.
"deeply informed by" – Use to connect ideas to a broader framework (e.g., "My approach is deeply informed by my studies").
"guide the design by modifying constraints" – A concise way to describe iterative problem-solving.
"shared understanding that expert developers have" – Useful for talking about team dynamics or specialized knowledge.
"inevitable mistakes" – A natural phrase to acknowledge errors without sounding unconfident.

Fix Your Weak Spots: Rhythm and Stress in Long Sentences

The video’s conversational yet formal tone is ideal for practicing shadowing technique—repeat lines aloud to mimic the speaker’s pace and stress. Notice how Dave Farley emphasizes key words like "evolutionary process" or "tourist map" to highlight important ideas. Many learners struggle with long sentences, but shadowing this dialogue helps you master rhythm, ensuring you don’t rush or stumble over complex structures. Focus on pausing after commas and stressing nouns/verbs to improve clarity. Pair this with shadow speech drills daily, and you’ll quickly see progress in your English pronunciation and overall speaking flow. For extra practice, try summarizing the video’s main points using phrases from the bank—this builds both fluency and vocabulary retention!

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If we're doing a good job we'll discover · If we are sensible, we will design
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is produced · being called · was called
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	haven't been · have seen · has seen
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	really which is · services, which means · monolith, which is

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?