Ask somebody in the building industry to visually communicate the architecture of a building and you’ll likely be presented with site plans, floor plans, elevation views, cross-section views and detail drawings. In contrast, ask a software developer to communicate the software architecture of a software system using diagrams and you’ll likely get a confused mess of boxes and lines.
I’ve asked thousands of software developers to do just this over the past decade and continue to do so today. The results still surprise me, with the thousands of photos taken during these software architecture sketching workshops suggesting that effective visual communication of software architecture is a skill that’s sorely lacking in the software development industry.
Source: The Art of Visualising Software Architecture, Simon Brown, Leanpub, https://leanpub.com/visualising-software-architecture