Friday, August 17, 2012

5' on IT-Architecture: the modern software architect


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Whilst programming is a necessary activity, there is a whole bunch of activities that are sufficient to be successful as an architect. Doing architecture is a lot about collaboration, evaluating alternatives objectively (neutral and fair-minded) and about decision making. It's a lot about communication, dealing with other individuals that almost always have their own opinions. Further more it's a lot about forming teams and designing the ideal development process around those teams to solve the concrete problem. Last not least it's about designing (structuring) the solution in a way that all functional and non-functional requirements are well covered. You can do all that more or less without super actual technical knowledge. But I believe an architect can do better if he/she has technical expertise gathered by day-to-day coding business. In the long run you cannot be a technical architect without sufficient coding practice.

Figure 1: Activities of the software architect

Solving tradeoffs

When I worked as an architect I often found myself in difficult tradeoff situations. That is, I wanted to improve one quality attribute, but to achieve that I needed to downgrade another. Here is a simple but very common example: its often desireable to have a highly changeable system with best possible performance. However, these two attributes - performance and changeability - typically correlate negatively, when you want to increase changeability you often loose efficiency. Doing architecture often means to find the golden mean between competing system qualities - it means choosing the right alternative that represents the best compromise. It's about finding the balance between system qualities and the environmental factors of that system (e.g. steakholders, requirements). The operations manager will focus on the efficiency of a new system, while the development manager will argue that it's important to have a changeable system that generates little maintenance costs. The client wants to have a new system with the highest degree of business process automation as possible. These situations consume a reasonalbe amount of time and energy.

Sharing knowledge and communication

Another superior important activity: sharing knowledge in a team of technical experts and other steakholders. The core problem of software development is to transform fuzzy knowledge of domain experts into merciless logical machine code of silly computers that only understand two digits: 0 and 1. This is a long way through the venturesome and endless jungle of human misunderstandings! Therefore, architects communicate a lot. They use models to do that. Models serve as a mapping mechanism between human brains and computers. The set of problems that can arise during the knowledge-to-binary transformation is very diverse. It's impossible that every team member knows all of them. That's another reason why sharing knowledge in a team is so superior important.

Nobody is perfect!

Needless to say that nobody is perfect. Every team is different and so is every concrete situation. So in one situation one may be the right architect for the team while in other team set-ups that person doesn't fit. An architect can also have different strengths. I know architects that communicate and socialize very well but don't do so good in designing solutions or organizing the development process. Although they don't master each individual skill, they're all good architects. The common ground is that they were all down-to-earth developers.

That's all I wanted to express today.
So long, Niklas

1 comment:

  1. On designing databases, I face trade offs between normalized table design vs. efficient table design. Efficient design usually has lots of redundancy that may be hard to maintain, but efficient when you need to retrieve things