It is an oversimplification to say that we are living in extraordinary times. When my team was first asked to work from home back in February we were happy to do our part in attempting to stem the tide of an inevitable global pandemic. While we were eager to help, we were also nervous about how suddenly distributing our co-located team would affect our way of working. And yet, after several months we’ve settled into a “new normal” that looks surprisingly similar to our way of working from Before. Much about how we worked changed, in some cases dramatically, but a handful of design methods that were central to our team remained effective even after the shift from a co-located to fully distributed context. In particular, mob programming, example mapping, architecture decision records, and visual thinking are consistently among the most versatile and reliable tools in my silver toolbox.

In this talk we’ll briefly explore these four methods and speculate about what makes them effective tools for software architects in such a broad range of contexts and situations. While this is not a talk about remote work per se, we’ll attempt to use the shifting context of work we’ve all experienced to further isolate variables that might help us identify other potential mighty methods waiting for software architects to adopt.