The Pragmatic Architect

The software architects role has changed in response to the changing demands of software engineering practice.

A look at the software for an automated weather station shows that energy can be treated like any other architectural quality attribute.

There are two popular creation myths about software architectures: the Solitary Architect and the Emergent Architecture.

The amount of technical risk and the underlying uncertainty in a software development project can affect the amount of architecting that developers perform…

Software architects in agile environments face the dilemma of determining how much effort goes into architecting up front, before development starts.

DevOps practices deal with such things as the velocity of releases, how fast incidents are handled, and the enforcement of organizationally specified…

Should the people performing a systems architecture work also develop some of the systems production code Involving architects in…

Psychometrics measures mental traits, abilities, and processes.

Optimizing the energy consumption of today's Internet-scale systems will require a radical approach that considers the whole system.

Complex software systems often require continuous refactoring to ensure longevity in the face of changing requirements.

Just as physicists infer dark matter's presence on the basis of its gravitational effects on visible matter, we can conceptualize a "darkitecture" that…

As software systems have evolved, so has software architecture, with practices growing to meet each era's new challenges.

The software architecture pendulum is swinging away from traditional practices and toward agile and continuous practices.

Architecture principles epitomize architecture's function: to clearly define the necessary constraints on a system's design without…

Most software architecture books focus on building new systems.

Given environmentalism's rising tide and increasing energy prices and IT workloads, architects must determine whether they can continue…

An architect whose skills and capabilities match a project's needs will more likely be successful.

Difficulties frequently arise when agile development teams and software architects work together.

The metaphor "architecting in the gaps" can help software development teams clearly understand the software architect's role and how…

An architecture haiku aims to capture software system architecture's most important details on a single piece of paper.

A refactoring aims to improve a certain quality while preserving others.

Successful architectural oversight is a key determinant of a software development project's success.

This column discusses architectural descriptions and the process of representing and communicating designs and how UML is useful when creating…

Five pieces of advice can help architects become more effective in an agile world without having to implement new methods or frameworks.

Architectural hoisting is a design technique where the responsibility for enforcing an intentional design constraint is implemented in the code…

Many types of architects work in the software industry, but when we consider the breadth of their work and their primary expertise, we find that they…

Does agile development need architecture Does architecture need agile development These two questions are debated time and again, frequently…

"Innovation" and "innovative architecture" are topics of broad popularity in software engineering.

There is a common belief in the software community that nonfunctional quality is fundamentally important for architecture sustainability and…

Leadership is the key for architects to balance all their activities and duties with the interests of different stakeholders without losing control of…

There is broad consensus that architects should code.

Architecture mastery is more than professional expertise in modern software engineering methods and techniques.

Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt as a metaphor for the trade-off between writing clean code at higher cost and delayed de livery,…

Reengineering and rewriting are two common approaches for improving system quality-in addition to refactoring, which the last installment of…

Refactoring has a more precise definition than common practice might suggest: it's a change that improves the developmental quality of some part…

When explicitly considering the testability of software-centric systems, architects tend to be more conscious and thoughtful about their design…

In this installment, I turn my attention to the internals of software-centric systems, since usability is also of prime importance for the…

Usability has a significant impact on the success of software-centric systems and products.

To assure the expected operational and developmental system quality is actually delivered, a test-driven approach to architecture elaboration is…

Sustainable software architectures portray the fundamental properties of their application domains explicitly, to ensure the virtual world can "mimic"…

What are the top five properties that make a software design elegant In this column we follow on from the previous column, exploring the…

Many software architectures suffer from unnecessary, accidental complexity: arbitrary flexibility for its own sake, unnecessary features, design…

Architects are directly affected when software architecture failure and mistakes occur.

In the first part of this article, the author analyzed some common software architecture mistakes.

The paper is an editorial on software architecture.

This paper present the software architecture, design, and development-but through the eyes of a practicing software architect.