14+ years of professional experience in Technical Architect.
A software architect needs to interact with clients, product managers, and developers in order to envision, model and provide initial models and designs that can be built.
This role also may cover the meeting potential or current customers.
A software architect has to constantly review the code to ensure the quality of the design by avoiding complexity, advocating clarity and to do this with the team. This usually requires hands-on work in terms of developing prototypes, contributing code or evaluating technologies.
The role of a software architect includes collaborative working with a degree of humility and providing mentoring as required. Such collaboration also allows the architect to become familiar with the skills and interests in the team and to share their knowledge with the rest of the team. Humility is required to ensure that all the team is listened to, as they may have more specific experience or knowledge for the problem at hand.
Taking into account all of the main aspects the software architect role includes, its obvious that this person should have knowledge in programming, management, psychology, communication and even finance. So, what are the main skills and qualities this specialist must have
The main characteristics of a software architect:
Broad and deep technical knowledge. This should be obvious since one cannot become a software architect with a musical background. The architect usually has knowledge in several technological stacks at a decent level and should have a good understanding of a few other ones. The software architect should also be prepared to compose a large number of technical documentation, reports, and diagrams.
Responsibility. A software architect should understand those architect decisions are usually the most expensive. A person in this position should take the most responsible approach to his work and to the decisions made. If the developer’s error costs a couple days of work of one person, then the architect’s mistake can cost person-years on complex projects.
Communicability. A good specialist should be able to talk with customers in the language of business, managers of all levels, business analysts and developers in their languages. To explain all the action correctly, a software architect has to grow a natural charisma and ability to convince people. Usually, architects are laconic, eloquent and competent speakers. While software architects participate in discussions they should be able to persuade the others.
Management skills. This includes both organizational and leadership skills. The ability to lead a team, which may be distributed and composed of very different specialists.
Stress resistance. A software architect works with different people from different areas, rapidly changing demands or even with changing business environments. Therefore, it is necessary to be ready for stress and to look for some ways to escape negative emotions. Work is always more pleasant when you’re happy.
Analytic skills. One of the most important tasks is the ability to represent an abstract problem in the form of some finite real object of the system, which can be evaluated, designed and developed.
The most important responsibility is complete technical support of the project from the moment of inception, through product release, to development of enhancements. The other responsibilities considered among the main ones are:
● Identifying business requirements and requirements of the stakeholders on the project
● Designing the entire system based on the received requirements
● Choosing the system architecture and each individual component of this system at a high level
● Choosing the technologies for the implementation of each component and connections between the components
● Architectural review
● Code-review
● Writing project documentation and its support
● Creating unified development standards in the company
● Controlling the architecture during the next iteration of the system release
There are a lot. Crafting the right architecture to solve the problem at hand is only part of architects’ responsibilities. They must also:
control over correct using the architecture
control over timing and deadline
control over synchronization of the software with the system architecture
do performance quality control
give input as needed to issues like the tool and environment selection
interact with management and stakeholders
resolve disputes and make tradeoffs
resolve technical problems
understand and plan for evolutionary paths
plan for new technology insertion
manage risk identification and risk mitigation strategies associated with the architecture
