"How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course." —Fred Brooks

"So how are we supposed to get great architects, if they only get the chance to architect fewer than a half-dozen times in their career?" —Ted Neward

Architecture Kata exercises (https://archkatas.herokuapp.com/) are great activities to deliberately build skills in on-the-spot technical solution design. This workshop will give attendees both a theoretical and practical experience with this activity and allow them to conduct the same exercises within their teams/organisations.

This deep-dive will describe the purpose and structure of these exercises and then outline an incremental approach to completing a Kata. With this background, the attendees will form small groups and collaboratively design their own solution to a different Kata problem, guided by the experience of the facilitator(s). The final stage of the workshop consists of all the groups sharing and discussing their solutions with the entire set of attendees.

1. Introduction to Architecture Katas (20 minutes)

2. Facilitated small group kata exercise (140 minutes)

3. Group shareback and exercise review (20 minutes)

The intended audience for this workshop are architects, tech leads and/or senior engineers who are growing into roles which require architecture thinking.