Who Needs an Architect?

Hi, this entry will talk about an article titled: “Who Needs an Architect?”, written by Martin Fowler. Basically, it discusses the definition of architecture and one related term: architect, but, obviously, focusing on software.
One thing I agree with the author is about our nonconformity with the IEEE’s definition of software architecture, despite the fact that It was defined by software development experts. I think that that definition has to be restated and then better explained.

But this similarity with the author's opinion doesn’t mean that I agree with the author’s definition explained later in the paper: “The shared understanding of the system design” or “Architecture is about important stuff” or “things that people perceive as hard to change”. 
The only salvageable definition is the first one, I think an architect must have a better understanding and experience of software design and development, so he would be able to share that knowledge with the other team members that aren’t at the same level of understanding and this could, effectively, distinguish a normal developer, from an architect.
But the last two definitions are completely relative on the project treated at that time. There will always be disagreements about what people, architects or even developers think about what is “important stuff” and what they “perceive as hard to change”. The author tries to explain that what makes a component significant is that an expert developer say so, and again that would totally depend on each developer. We can’t use that generalization in a concept with a great level of importance as Software Architecture. 
I think Software architecture could be better defined.

I will end this entry with the last thing I agree with the author in this paper: software isn’t limited by physics, but it is limited by imagination, design, organization, and properties of people, so the real enemy in software architecture and development is us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Introduction to Metaprogramming

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article called “An Introduction to Metaprogramming” written by our professor Ariel Ortiz in 2007. First of all, I just want to mention that I’m really impressed because I didn’t know that our professor had many published articles and papers (we saw the others in my other blog for Compilers Design course). Basically, as its name says, it talks about metaprogramming, which is defined during the article as a program that generates other programs or just program parts. It is used to eliminate or just reduce a “tedious” programming task. It is like instead of writing complex machine code programs, we use any high-level language and use the compiler of that language to do the translation into the programs equivalent in machine code (low-level language). I have to admit that before reading this paper, I hadn’t fully understood the metaprogramming meaning and importance. We used and applied that term in a past course called Programming Languages...
Read more

Understanding the SOLID Principles

Hi, this entry is going to talk about a section called “Understanding the SOLID principles” from the book “Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success” by Wiley in 2013. Basically, the acronym SOLID is explained a round this book section. This acronym stands for five accepted principles about object-oriented programming and design: 1.       S ingle Responsibility Principle: It stays that a class should have just one responsibility. Despite the fact that this principle sounds easy, I found it a little bit complicated, because the explanation wasn’t direct and simplified. Also, the author mentioned that there might be cases in which a class might have two responsibilities. So, at the end, what exactly does this principle stands for? 2.       O pen/Closed Principle: It stays that a class or a function should be open for extension but closed for modification. What does this mean? Our code must have the cap...
Read more

Microservices

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about an article written by James Lewis and Martin Fowler called “Microservices” in 2014. Basically, by calling microservices, they are referring to like a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. But something interesting is that there is not a precise definition of that type of architectural style, there are only common characteristics around distinct organizations, business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in endpoints and also decentralized control of languages and data. This was the first time I heard this term, and something strange is that despite I didn’t notice about its existence I’d used them sometimes. Later in the articles, the authors gave us some characteristics that any Microservice Architecture must have. They are the following: 1.       Componentization via Services:  This is telling us that by building software, we put together...
Read more