1-4: "Who needs an architect?"

The important question after reading the article "Who Needs an Architect?" is what is the real definition of what is architecture and all of its connotations that architecture involves. Architecture has two different meanings:

  1. It is when all the expert developers working on that project have a shared understanding of the system design. This shared understanding is called "architecture", this understanding includes how the system is divided into components and how the components interact through interfaces.
  2. Architecture is the set of decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project (but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other.
Having this in mind, one of the principal differences between building architecture and software architecture is that in the building architecture you have got physical constraints; also, a lot of decisions about a building are hard to change. In the other hand, if you pick any one aspect of software then you can make it easy to change but this has several repercussions; making something easy to change makes the overall system a little more complex, and making everything easy to change makes the entire system very complex.

The author also defines two kind of architects. The first one, Architectus Reloadus, is the persons that make all the important decisions. The architect does this because only a single mind is needed to ensure a system's conceptual integrity; however, I do not think like this because if only one single master mind make all the important decisions it is certain that something will get out of the sight of the architecture design all this will impact the whole project leading to bad estimations of time, costs and scope.

The second kind of architect is the Architects Oryzus, this kind of architect must be very aware of what is going on in the project, looking out for important issues and tackling them before they become a serious problem. Also this kind of architect, needs to be more than one person in order to achieve a better focus and different perspectives of the architecture design.

Finally, I totally agree with Johnson's idea that software is not limited by physics, like buildings are. Software is limited by imagination, by design, by organization. Basically, software is limited by properties of people, not properties of the world. With this in mind the real enemy in this topic is us.

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