• DOI:10.1109/MS.2003.1231144
• Corpus ID: 356506

Design - Who needs an architect?

@article{Fowler2003DesignW,
  title={Design - Who needs an architect?},
  author={Martin Fowler},
  journal={IEEE Software},
  year={2003},
  volume={20},
  pages={11-13}
}

• M. Fowler
• Published 1 September 2003
• Computer Science
• IEEE Software

W 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 schizo-phrenia 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. 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 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 architect.) 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 an 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 (at a given point in time) is its organization or structure of significant components interacting through interfaces, those components being composed of successively smaller components and interfaces. " Johnson responded: I was a reviewer on the IEEE standard that used that, and I argued uselessly that this was clearly a completely bogus definition. There is no highest level concept of a system. Customers have a different concept than developers. Customers do not care at all about the structure of significant components. So, perhaps an architecture is the highest level concept that developers have of a …