Who is an Architect? - Part 1

Now-a-days am attending interviews for my next job. Most of the calls are for the Architect position. While preparing for these, realized few responsibilities and activities that were part of my previous roles. And they are the main theme of this post.

As mentioned in the post title, questions that comes to every developer's mind is..

  • who is an Architect?
  • who can become an Architect?
  • what an Architect do?
  • what are the prerequisites for an individual to become as an Architect?
  • etc.,

Having mentioned all such questions, , would like to make things clear, out of my experience. Readers has every right to deny or challenge my understanding.

First of all, an Architect is like soul in the human body which you can never see but always experience the existence. This definition is totally true in small sized organizations. Because an Architect plays every role that is part of any implementation with in small scale industries. Architects are expected to be technically sound and functionally expert. The expertise comes with the knowledge and experience they gain from their previous jobs or personal observations from different implementations.

I remember reading from one of the articles by Mr. Joseph Hofstader, 'On software projects, the title Architect is often ambiguously defined and the value provided by architects is not easily quantifiable..'. That's true. In most of the situations the role is not predefined by either management or any other. But in all cases, the person who is acting as an Architect, will give life to the situation and serve the purpose that is being sought for. Did anyone ever thought that how this has become possible from nowhere to everywhere.

 

The only reason for the success of any Architect is the following..

    • Requirements gathering and understanding the business from the point of investors
    • Drawing the feasible and workable model in-terms of Technology and Business
    • Determine which Design pattern would best suite for the current situation and prototype
    • Convey the sprit of the Design to the least level of the ladder of development team

In any case, if any of one is failing, the consequent steps will yield unexpected results. For all the success of any and every Architect, the fundamental points are..

  1. understanding the business and
  2. correlating their past experiences or success stories of great applications implemented across the industry

Having mentioned that, the designation of an Architect wary from Technology vertical to Enterprise level. Depending on the role and responsibilities the designations can be attached to them. For about 3 yrs in my career I've freelanced working with different industry giants on short term as life saving or rescue missions for different domains. The  designation with in the teams that I worked, depends on what am I asked resolve.

As it is very short period of time with every client, it is next to impossible to understand the business and the architecture of the application that is being built over 2 yrs and resolve the bottlenecks of the application. But one thing that I kept on my mind towards understanding the bottlenecks of any application is the .NET framework fundamentals and their flaws.

Coming back to the definitions and flavors of an Architect, there are different varieties of designations that are widely popular in the market.

Technical Architect, is some one who is extremely knowledgeable on specific technology. This person purely concentrates the latest updates of the technology

Solution Architect, is some on who is deeply aware of the business and the functionality of every interacting pieces of the business. This person is not necessarily technology agonistic

Enterprise Architect, is some one who takes care of the business and concentrates on how to make different functional units to work aligned to mission and vision of the Enterprise

Infrastructure Architect, is some one who takes care the smooth execution of the release management of the application from development phase to production environment. This role is the key for the application execution bed.

 

Apart of the above mentioned roles, there are plenty of fancy designations that would sound like, Software Architect, Business Architect, blah .. blah..  In this post, i've mentioned about different designations and roles that an Architect would be playing. Will try to post some other interesting facts about an Architect in the next post. Till such time, happy reading and blogging.

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