As I said yesterday, we're going to publish first experiences of being in an architect role and, without further ado, I'd like to present Richard Holdsworth's first experiences. Richard is a recently appointed technical architect with a major international travel company, where he's involved in the architecture of a new system built around a service oriented architecture.

At the time of being asked to perform the role of Architect I felt that I was perhaps at least a year or two from being "technically qualified" to consider myself as such. However, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss so I braced myself for an intense number of months in which I would be branded a fraud.

However, no sooner did my mentor arrive that I began to understand the wider aspect and responsibilities of the role and how it is not an elevation of status above a senior developer but merely a side step from the development team to enable us the ability to view, and be involved with, the whole development process.

As the role is new to my company there were a few misunderstandings early on regarding the job specification and boundaries such as:

• How much time we should spend with the business?
• Should we be responsible for chasing development progress?
• How much code, if any, we should contribute?

I am happy to say that now I enjoy talking to business as much as possible to drive out the design, I'm not expected to provide progress reports, except on my own work, and I contribute as and when necessary to the development effort.

Unfortunately, partly due to my own misunderstanding of the role, I believe I spent too much time in the early part of the project concerned with the documentation that I was expected to produce to senior management when I feel I should have been getting my hands dirty with the actual technology and producing a prototype which would have improved my ability to mentor and not to mention early testing.

As for the other aspects of my job such as code reviews, best practice and other methods to ensure the quality of software development I find it hard to imagine how any IT project can function without an Architect these days.

I like the expression about the architect role being a "side step from the development team". I'd not really thought about it like this before but it makes a lot of sense. Rather than an architect stepping down to do some development, they're stepping back into the development team. An interesting perspective and I can definitely relate to the questions around the boundaries of the role because I had similar questions when I was new to the role myself. Many thanks to Rick for sharing your experiences.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 23 March 2006 15:07:41 GMT #