You can find Software Architects in I guess the half of all German software projects. A Software architect is often a formerly senior developer. Sometime he is part of a software development team sometimes multiple Software architects are aggregated a Architecture Teams. Why companies think that a Software architect is good idea:
- Increasing the software quality
- Have the big architecture picture in mind and keep every thing right
- Avoid divergent development branches
- Avoiding the development of concurrent solutions for the same problem over different teams
If you know more arguments for Software architects, please comment below.
The main misconception is that companies and many developer too don't understand that software development is different to 'normal' engineering or building a house. The major difference is the complexity! Software development is much more complex. This is also the reason why all model driven software development approaches fail.
Lets talk about point 1, Software architects ensure software quality. How could he do that? Bad Idea, give him the power to merge feature branches. This gives him the power do suppress alternative ideas. This means the software architect impede the software development progress. If he accept only code that is like his code he additionally blocks all development because every other developer have to ask for every thing. The creates a frustrating situation in the whole team. At the end, we impede progress, limiting work throughput and frustrate the software developers.
Point 2, that's for me a pseudo argument. No team need a dedicated developer for this purpose. This is done by normal inter team communication. There is no befit but higher costs.
Point 3. Many project people like many developers believes that alternative solutions are bad because it"s a wast of time. But this not right. What you have to understand is that alternative solutions are great. You can choose between different solution and take the better one. If you have only one solution there is a risk that your current solution is the worst solution but in case of multiple solutions your are sure that the chosen solution is not worst solution. This is a totally underestimated benefit.
Point 4. This is a general misunderstanding of requirements. On the first view same problems looks equal. But in reality the problems are different. If someone comes with this idea around the corner please understand that this phrase is an indicator of a lack of user stories aka requirements. Pressing the second problem into an existing software solution ends up with a huge bunch of technical debt and missing of at least one requirements.
At the end the software architect is not needed an brings more risk to every agile project. May software development can learn from golf. Golf is not a game of perfect. Golf is a game the best miss. The one that makes the smallest mistake wins.
PS 1: Software architects are almost formerly senior software developers. Now in the new position they spend most of the time in meetings. Some of them have no time for coding. The advises they give are 5 to 10 years old. It's greeting from the past but not an improvement.
PS 2: I also worked together with great software architects (greetings to the real Mirko). But these guys working differently.
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