Architectural Kata 2.0: practise decisions without a live project at stake

Architects rarely get to practise decisions without the risk of a real project. In the workshop, teams take the same business problem through the six design steps, use AI agents that question their choices, and defend the result in front of a demanding client.

  • One day, hands-on
  • Open editions in Polish cities, or in-house for one company
  • Run with Sebastian Dąbkowski and Wojciech Kasa
  • Every participant gets an AI agent for architecture work

For people who make architecture decisions

  • Architects

    who want to rehearse the full path from a brief to a design, and defend it.

  • Senior engineers and tech leads

    who are starting to make architecture decisions and want a repeatable way to do it.

  • Teams in one company

    who want a shared language for decisions. The in-house edition is run for a single organisation.

Skills I help architects practise

Most of my teaching happens in workshops, where people work through a realistic problem instead of listening to a lecture. These are the skills the exercises are built around.

  1. From business goals to architecture requirements

    Turning a business brief into functional requirements and the top three architecture characteristics, with Event Storming as the starting point.

  2. Finding system boundaries

    Discovering the domain and its bounded contexts before deciding how to split the system.

  3. Comparing options and justifying trade-offs

    Naming constraints and risks, weighing the options and recording the decision in an ADR.

  4. Communicating architecture

    C4 diagrams and a short pitch that a business stakeholder can follow and challenge.

  5. Testing assumptions

    Defending the design in front of a demanding client and answering the hard questions before they come up in a real project.

  6. Using AI in architecture work

    AI agents that ask hard questions and draft documents from the team's notes, while the people keep the decisions.

Six steps, one problem, a demanding client

Teams work through the same steps I use on client projects. Each step ends with an artifact the next one builds on, and a later step can send you back to revise an earlier one.

  1. 01

    Functional requirements

    Event Storming board, actor and flow map, prioritised capabilities

  2. 02

    Architecture characteristics

    Top three architecture characteristics with target values

  3. 03

    Risks, constraints and trade-offs

    Risk map, options with their impact on cost, time and risk

  4. 04

    Technical design

    C4 diagrams and Architecture Decision Records

  5. 05

    Fitness functions

    Automated architecture checks, performance budgets, dependency rules

  6. 06

    Team Topologies

    Team map with stream-aligned, platform and enabling teams and their interaction modes

The six steps in detail

Built on a competition we won

The process comes from the work behind MonitorMe, the design that took first place at the O'Reilly Architectural Katas in Winter 2024. The workshop turns that experience into a day of deliberate practice.

MonitorMe case studyTalking about the workshop on Better Software Design ↗

Bring the workshop to your team

The in-house edition runs for one organisation. Open editions and dates are listed on the Arpeggia Studio site.

In-house workshop ↗Open dates ↗