Who Needs an Architect?

Software is not limited by physics, like buildings are. It is limited by imagination, by design, by organization. this is mentioned in the article “Who Needs an Architect?” by Martin Fowler, but how to construct great software if we don’t understand the basis of it. it is true that if we want to do something we have to know a little bit of theory, like lerning to drive.

In the case of software, we must appreciate software architecture. In the contexts of this article Software architecture has two important meanings. The first one is the understanding of how the system is divided into components and how the components interact through interfaces. For me this is important because if you don’t understand which is the project and what does the client needs, this would be difficult to make a prototype and worse yet realize the program.

On the other hand, the second meaning that they mentioned is “Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project”. For us like software programmers it is important to identify which requirements have high priority than others, moreover if some of them depends on other components. Specially if one of use wants to be a Project Manager it is essential to have this ability.

So, if we combine them we have a complete understanding of what is software architecture. For me, software architecture design is a fundamental part when developing. If your basis it is not well design your product will be wrong. Furthermore, I think that one of an architect’s most important tasks is to remove architecture by finding ways to eliminate irreversibility in software designs.  So as it is mention in the paper, building architecture and software architecture may have similarities the only difference is that Software is not limited by physics.