Experiences and musings of Anthony Langsworth, a software architect working on commercially available enterprise software.
Ignoring software architects’ code, the primary deliverables of architects are technical vision and high level designs. These are rarely complete and correct in the first draft and getting feedback from stakeholders and developers is vital to their success. Indeed, the best software architects are those that consistently extract the best feedback. The key to effectively receiving [...]
As stated previously in this blog, software architects must be innovators. They are responsible for creating a technical vision to apply new technologies to further the customers’ goals and/or reduce development costs and for high level designs. Many books, lectures, blogs and so on describe the process of innovation and are not repeated here but, when confronted with a [...]
“Innovation” appears to have joined words like “synergy” in the buzzword nomenclature but is central to a software architect’s role, whether it be creating and driving either customer impacting or cost saving innovations. Unfortunately, many software architects and developers get frustrated when new ideas, features and improvements continuously are ignored, pushed to a nebulous future release [...]
A software architect is a difficult role at the best of times, particularly when working in a different office, time zone or country to the development team, other architects or management. In this case, architects miss the “water cooler” and “hallway” conversations and, unfortunately, “out of sight” is often “out of mind”. Much of what [...]
Few things are so error prone and political as the architects’ ”technical vision”. Technical vision identifies longer term technical goals (such as add iPad support or upgrade to the new database version) and describes how to reach them, perhaps over multiple releases. Clearly, this is only useful for larger, ongoing or technically complex projects. Many architects [...]
Privacy is one of those oft misused terms that people throw around, particularly related to discussions of the SOPA or PROTECT-IP acts in the US. This is an ethical question and, unfortunately, arguments on either side usually degenerate into straw man arguments about “big brother” versus “pirates, criminals or terrorists”. Taking a step back, privacy can [...]
Of course, a software architect individual needs to know the product’s languages, frameworks and tools - it is one of the main things that separates him or her from a business analyst or program manager. If they have previously been a senior developer on the team, that helps with credibility. However, your best developers are not [...]
I attended the Australian Information Security Association (AISA) National Conference for 2011 on Wednesday 9th November. For an event free to AISA members, the speakers were excellent and I recommend this to anyone involved with or interested in IT security in Australia. What follows is a summary of important or interesting points and how I believe [...]
Small teams of senior people working on a well understood problems with known tools and little integration or dependencies on other applications do not need architects. This covers a significant proportion of line of business applications written today. However, there comes a point where cracks appear. There is no well understood threshold for a team size [...]
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