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design
Editor: Martin Fowler
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T h o u g h t Wo r k s
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fowler@acm.org
Who Needs an Architect?
Martin Fowler
andering down our corridor a while ago, I saw my colleague Dave Rice in a particularly grumpy mood. My brief question caused a violent statement, “We shouldn’t interview anyone who has ‘architect’ on his resume.” At first blush, this was an odd turn of phrase, because we usually introduce Dave as one of our leading architects.
The reason for his title schizophrenia is the fact that, even by our industry’s standards, “architect” and “architecture” are terribly overloaded words. For many, the term “software architect” fits perfectly with the smug controlling image at the end of Matrix Reloaded.
Yet even in firms that have the greatest contempt for that image, there’s a vital role for the technical leadership that an architect such as Dave plays.
W
What is architecture?
When I was fretting over the title for Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
(Addison-Wesley, 2002), everyone who reviewed it agreed that “architecture” belonged in the title. Yet we all felt uncomfortable defining the word. Because it was my book, I felt compelled to take a stab at defining it.
My first move was to avoid fuzziness by just letting my cynicism hang right out. In a sense, I define architecture as a word we use when we want to talk about design but want to puff it up to make it sound important. (Yes, you can imagine a similar phenomenon for ar2
IEEE SOFTWARE
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
chitect.) However, as so often occurs, inside the blighted cynicism is a pinch of truth. Understanding came to me after reading a posting from Ralph Johnson on the Extreme Programming mailing list. It’s so good I’ll quote it all.
A previous posting said
The RUP, working off the IEEE definition, defines architecture as “the highest level concept of a system in its environment. The architecture of a software system
Editor: Martin Fowler
■
T h o u g h t Wo r k s
■
fowler@acm.org
Who Needs an Architect?
Martin Fowler
andering down our corridor a while ago, I saw my colleague Dave Rice in a particularly grumpy mood. My brief question caused a violent statement, “We shouldn’t interview anyone who has ‘architect’ on his resume.” At first blush, this was an odd turn of phrase, because we usually introduce Dave as one of our leading architects.
The reason for his title schizophrenia is the fact that, even by our industry’s standards, “architect” and “architecture” are terribly overloaded words. For many, the term “software architect” fits perfectly with the smug controlling image at the end of Matrix Reloaded.
Yet even in firms that have the greatest contempt for that image, there’s a vital role for the technical leadership that an architect such as Dave plays.
W
What is architecture?
When I was fretting over the title for Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
(Addison-Wesley, 2002), everyone who reviewed it agreed that “architecture” belonged in the title. Yet we all felt uncomfortable defining the word. Because it was my book, I felt compelled to take a stab at defining it.
My first move was to avoid fuzziness by just letting my cynicism hang right out. In a sense, I define architecture as a word we use when we want to talk about design but want to puff it up to make it sound important. (Yes, you can imagine a similar phenomenon for ar2
IEEE SOFTWARE
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
chitect.) However, as so often occurs, inside the blighted cynicism is a pinch of truth. Understanding came to me after reading a posting from Ralph Johnson on the Extreme Programming mailing list. It’s so good I’ll quote it all.
A previous posting said
The RUP, working off the IEEE definition, defines architecture as “the highest level concept of a system in its environment. The architecture of a software system