Some interesting thoughts borrowed from my notes of the “How to Become an Agile Architect” talk presented yesterday by Uwe Friedrichsen from Codecentric at the Jazoon 2011 conference in Zurich.
* Architecture is a set of skills and not a role: if you don’t have these skills available for your project, you might get quickly in trouble.
* Becoming an architect is a journey: you should leave your comfort zone and programming expertise area to explore and learn about the other software development domains like requirements, operations or testing.
* An architect focuses on people and not on systems: if you are unable to communicate your architecture, how perfect it might be, you are going to fail. People skills are the most important for an architect.
* Less is more: minimize complexity and use the JDUF (Just enough Up Front Design) design principle.
He also pointed the audience to a very interesting Architect Competency Framework produced by Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer. The web site of Bredemeyer Consulting contains a lot of valuable material about software architecture.