To Software Architects: Serve End Users, Not Your Egos

oftware Architect is a great job title. It looks great on business cards. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you can say you're a Software Architect. It sounds so much better than Software Engineer. The problem arises when this job title leads to the all-too-common behavior of excessive diagrams, rewriting libraries that are available off the shelf, writing wrappers for everything, and instrumentation so excessive that its performance penalties exceed the resource utilization of the actual program's functions. These behaviors are transforming software development from the practical exercise of delivering what the customer needs into the academic endeavor of building gold-plated monuments to our egos.

Without a doubt, building any piece of software more complex than a few hundred lines of code requires careful planning. Larger projects require a division of work among teams, which in turn requires even more planning to ensure that as the pieces come together in the finished product they will work as expected. The person who does this type of planning is the software architect. He or she decides where one chunk of the application ends and the next one begins, determines the contract between that function and the rest of the system, and then hands it off to developers to write the code.