Fitness functions introduced by evolutionary architecture, borrowed from evolutionary computing, are executable functions that inform us if our applications and architecture are objectively moving away from their desired characteristics. They're essentially tests that can be incorporated into our release pipelines. One of the major characteristics of an application is the freshness of its dependencies to other libraries, APIs or environmental components that a dependency drift fitness function tracks to flag the out-of-date dependencies that require updating. With the growing and maturing number of tools that detect dependency drifts, such as Dependabot or Snyk, we can easily incorporate dependency drift fitness functions into our software release process to take timely action in keeping our application dependencies up to date.
Many teams and organizations have no formal or consistent way of tracking technical dependencies in their software. This issue often shows itself when that software needs to be changed, at which point the use of an outdated version of a library, API or component will cause problems or delay. Dependency drift fitness function is a technique to introduce a specific evolutionary architecture fitness function to track these dependencies over time, thus giving an indication of the possible work needed and whether a potential issue is getting better or worse.
