Think Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant (FIRE)

This week Xin Yao is our guest. She will share her opinion about the heuristic “Think Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant (FIRE)” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Think_Fast.2C_Inexpensive.2C_Restrained.2C_and_Elegant_.28FIRE.29). We navigate between the four principles and Xin’s experience as a sociotechnical architect. She shares her experiences within a sociotechnical system, and what is changing in the role of a software architect.

Xin recommends the following resources:

• The Simplicity Cycle: A Field Guide to Making Things Better Without Making Them Worse by Dan Ward
• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides) by Marshall B. Rosenberg
• Learn Wardley Mapping (https://learnwardleymapping.com/)
• Virtual DDD (https://virtualddd.com/)

Xin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/xinxin/ and @xin_yy) is a sociotechnical software architect in Danske Bank. She explores Domain-Driven Design in her organisation’s IT modernisation journey from a mainframe-centric landscape to cloud-based services. She regularly facilitates collaborative domain modelling workshops, using visual discovery techniques such as event storming and Wardley Mapping to co-create shared domain understanding and link to customer value. She is particularly curious of whether blending DDD into her org’s current agile transformation initiative can give its habitual top-down architecture gestation culture a gentle nudge toward a democratic metamorphosis. Xin dreams of and works on elevating software architecture to a communication tool cross disciplines, owned and evolved by agile teams organically.