Comments on "Who need an architect?"

The word architecture or architect if often misunderstood, some people think architect or architecture are just fancy ways of saying design or designer, but the real meaning of these two concepts is a lot more complex, and a lot deeper.

Some people say architecture is just “the highest level concept of a system in its own environment”, this is not completely accurate. Another definition people consider is “the shares understanding of how a system works by everybody involved in the development process. This means that everyone in the development team, understands how the large components are composed by smaller components, but the architecture only includes the components and interfaces that are understood by all the developers.

Finally there is a third accepted definition by the software community, this definition states that an architecture is the set of design decisions that must be made early in a project.

The architect must not only design the main structure an module relationship between the software components, the architect must be very aware of what’s going on in the project, looking out for important issues and following them before they become serious problems.

The most important role of the architect is to work in collaboration with the development team to make sure everything is following the design plan and expected outcome, the role of the architect it no really to mentor the team, but to make it raise and take on more complex issues to develop a better and more efficient software.

It is very important to get the design architecture right before the development process starts, architecture design error may result in a very complicating issue to solve once the development process has started. Although it has hard to go back and change our designs, it is not impossible.

Software has little limitations, but the main limitations software development may have are design and organization, so this is why making proper architectures is crucial for our software development projects.