Bill Venners has just posted a short piece entitled Software Architecture is Leadership, which references another article about the definition of architecture and then Bill adds his own comments about architecture providing leadership.

I think one of the most important ways to think about architecture is that it is an opportunity to provide leadership. The architecture embodies the decisions of the architects, the leaders, on how things should be done in the project. The architecture should make it easy for people working on the project to do things the right way: the way the architects believe things should be done. In other words, instead of just saying that things should be done a certain way, the architects should design architectural systems and structures that guide the team down that path.

What I take away from this is that if an architect's role is about technical leadership, the resulting architecture is about communicating that leadership. If it leaves high-level questions unanswered and issues unresolved, we as architect's haven't done our job.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 04 April 2006 18:15:57 BST #