I've been talking through the role profile for software architects recently and I'm going to publish a revised version soon. In the meantime, I thought that it's worth clarifying exactly who the profile is aimed at. Although there might not be a common definition of "architecture", there is agreement that there are different scales of architecture. For example, you might have architecture at an application level, at a software system level or at an enterprise level.
Put simply; the role profile is aimed at those of us taking responsibility for the architecture of a bespoke software development, which I've summarised as follows.
Essentially, the scope of the role is the software and the infrastructure on which that software runs upon, which my experience suggests is what people mean by "software architect" or "technical architect" (i.e. they are aggregate terms). What do you think?
Simon is an independent consultant specializing in software architecture, and the author of Software Architecture for Developers (a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility). He’s also the creator of the C4 software architecture model and the founder of Structurizr, which is a collection of open source and commercial tooling to help software teams visualise, document and explore their software architecture.
You can find Simon on Twitter at @simonbrown ... see simonbrown.je for information about his speaking schedule, videos from past conferences and software architecture training.
as skilled as someone There's a tendency when discussing architects to refer to examples of bad ones. The discipline is certainly not unique in that regard!
It's a good question whether an architect needs to be skilled in the technologies they use. We've touched on this before and noted that you'll never be else, nor will you necessarily be even familiar with some of the technologies. The key is to become sufficiently familiar, sufficiently quickly to be making design decisions about those technologies with confidence.
An architect can't do that (effectively) on their own.