Enterprise patterns: Anna Karenina

Working with reference architectures, I met the new for me pattern or principle called “Anna Karenina”. The name of the principle derives from Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel “Anna Karenina”, which begins: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

The “Anna Karenina” principle states that a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavour to failure. Consequently, a successful endeavour (subject to this principle) is one for which every possible deficiency has been avoided.

So, during creation of a system it is necessary to

• find out a set of essential (positive and negative) factors (analysis), also known as a must-have list;
• separate these architectural concerns which is also a pattern (architecting);
• assemble all together as a stable system (synthesis).

If a reference architecture follows these two patterns then systems compliant to this reference architecture will have real changes to become good, right and successful. Certainly this justify extra efforts for developing reference architectures.

Thanks,

AS