Random Acts of Architecture

Many IT engineers aspire to be architects. They want to dictate the course of their products or services, leading their fellow engineers. To do so, they focus on designing the best and largest systems, learning all about design patterns, notations and understanding technology from top-to-bottom.

However, if such a thing can be said to exist, even the best design is wasted if it does not solve the right problem. Architects should start here, instead.

Depending on the organization, requirements are often supplied by product management, business analysts or management. During requirements analysis, architect validation identifies ambiguities, omissions, estimated time and resource costs and likely tradeoffs. The resulting requirements and priorities may differ substantially from the original as trade-offs and discoveries are made.

Requirements often present the business understanding of what technology should do, not the most impactful or beneficial things technology can do. Architects are in the best place bridge the gap, driving technology from the bottom-up instead of the top-down.

Business-supplied requirements often lack quality attributes or non-functional requirements like availability, performance and security. These are either assumed or difficult for non-technical people to articulate and architects are the best equipped to specify these.

Architects need to listen more than they talk, learning as much as they can about the business context of their work and its business value. Drilling into requirements is a good start, helping to understand requirements’ context, assumptions and priorities. There is no point where an architect understands everything, only a process to continually learn.

While it is tempting for a newly appointed architect to focus on their pet technical problems, ensuring they have a good pipeline of requirements helps architects to align their efforts to solve others’ problems, not just the ones they perceive. They also need to ensure the business outcomes are met, not just the technical enhancemnts.

Looking at it another way, a design is not just a model (approximation) of the implementation. A design is the requirements for the implementation. Like requirements gathering, design is iterative and may change through the review or implementation process. Like requirements gathering, design is a trade-off. Like requirements gathering, it is an abstraction, leaving some details to implementers. If an architect cannot understand or provide good requirements, their designs are going to be misunderstood, at best, or ignored, at worst.

Moreover, architects are leaders. Not leaders in the management sense but leaders by collaboration, communication and example.

While the technical leadership of architects is well understood, good architects move out of their comfortable technical conversations and into the less comfortable business conversations. As mentioned above, some requirements sit between the technical and business and stakeholders need assurance the system will meet their needs. No design pattern or notation will achieve this.

Architects should focus on outcomes and end-to-end systems, not the minutiae of their designs, particularly in agile environments where just-in-time design occurs or where component responsibility is delegated to teams. Trusting implementors by giving them clear interfaces, scope and direction is the best way to foster their trust in architects.

Architects must own their communication. The responsibility for implementors and stakeholders understanding the design and vision rests with the architects. A design or vision that is not communicated is not understood and an architect producing designs no one understands has zero business value.

An architect must also facilitate communication between teams, particularly when design changes ripple through other teams’ work.

Architects must be accountable for systems they architect. They need to listen to implementors to understand their challenges and how to mitigate them in current or future designs. They need to accept criticism from stakeholders when requirements are not met. They also need to be applauded when their projects or systems succeed.

While designs are the architect’s deliverables in many projects, an architect’s success is driven by their ability to ensure they are solving the right problems and assure people of that direction. Good architects look down toward the technical detail and ensure it is correct. Great architects also look up and around to understand how they can best provide value to the business, sometimes better than the business can.

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