Architectures: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This session covered do’s and don’ts of software Architecture. It described the different roles of Software Architects, and finished off by showing a vision of the future of Software Applications.

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p class=”MsoNormal”>I think it was a very good session. He started by describing the role of a software architect, in an effort to defend against the “Ivory tower” view of software architects. I’m not sure that the audience was the correct target for such a defense talk; however the overview of different types of Architects was interesting.

After describing Architects he described a series of Anti-patterns. I’m not going to list them here but the presentation of Anti-patterns was good. However at times he seemed a bit like a proponent of heavy processes, especially when discussing documentation. Now I’m very anti-documentation, and believe that documentation should be written on demand.

However he does have a point when saying: “If the requirements aren’t documented, how do you know that you’ve met them?”

We might not share the same vision here, but it is true that quite often requirements can get lost during development simply because we rely on a human brain to remember all the requirements.

To finish off he described a vision of the future where the future of application development revolves about Data and the architecture on how to data is transferred, persisted and accessed. He will be talking more on this in his talk “Why software sucks” that I will be attending tomorrow.

A quote I liked from the Session:

“Architecture is simplicity, not intellectual violence.”

Meaning a good architecture is something that can be described in 5 minutes.