When you plan a system you need to have growth in mind. Thats all the "scalability" talks they talk. Scaling is not a problem, first of all its good news: your customer base grows, so you need more power. You can always scale-up quiet easly. There are systems not designed for scaling at all, but their business are so prosperous that adding costly metal is no problem. This is valid when you don't install your software at customers site and you have a decent budget. Otherwise you have to build for scale. When architects plan a building that should scale-out or scale-up they will not build the future full-scale building but prepare the original one for scaling. How can a building preserve a livable structure when it grows? In the same way designing software for scale does not mean making it performing now, but sustain future improvements. Thats sensible and cost effective, but also a hard to prove. How can we structure our building now that we don't need to start from scratch once our business grows? How can we structure for transformation? How can the structure preserve and foster living transformation? Thats the Lebenswerk of Christopher Alexander and thats the holy grail of software architecture. We need to find structure that is able to cope with transformation over the lifetime of the software, and dare to ask: at the end, will it blend?

This is a big idea: www.cnet.com

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