Who needs an architect?

I think that the article’s author did a great job for setting a basis for a definition of architecture and for software architecture. I consider that the approach of defining architecture as the part of the design that is considered important, and as something that is difficult to change at later stages of the development. I consider this an accurate approach, since one of the parts we try to define at this stage of our majors is the language we will work on since we are not so versed yet in that field.

That being said, this helps to separate between software architecture and the definition of planning and designing of software development. Considering architecture as something more specific than the design helps understand what the past lecture for the blog tried to tell when defining software architecture and its types.

On the other hand, I quite disagree with the textual approach they took when specifying who determined what is software architecture. I don’t think that only the developers define what part of the system is important, since I think that the requirements that the customers give to the developers also play an important role to define the importance of a module. If a customer considers that one of the main activities of the system is financial calculations, then saving the expenses to the employee who introduced it, then important modules are going to be the calculation part and the storage one. Then is for the developers to decide if the role that the communications are going to play need to be crucial as well in order to decide if that is part of the architecture.

Another thing I think the article got right is to define the software architect as a senior who pushes forward his/her team to improve but still is there when a tricky situation appears. I think that this is an important characteristic that someone playing this role has to have and is quite useful. On the other hand, I don’t know how to feel about the part of his task being that he is not needed. I agree with Johnson that making something so versatile can make the system become complex. I do not believe that is a must, but sometimes I think it can be true.