Simon Brown on software architecture vs code

[@oreilly]

Click here to watch other keynotes and interviews from the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference: kzbin.info/aero/PL055Epbe6d5aFJdvWNtTeg_UEHZEHdInE

[@FrankKrasicki]

These are all well-intentioned speakers who are lost when it comes to software architecture issues. The relationship of code to architecture is (used to be) captured by object notations of one kind or another. The agile evangelists convinced everyone "you're not going to need that". So now we have a generation (or ten) of developers who have no design skills whatsoever and quite frankly don't even know such a thing ever existed. To conflate systems and complex systems architecture with code architecture sounds more like a chapter of Flatland than software development. The crab mentality of Agile is that Software Architects must be pulled back into code, build, and deploy cycle or else they're out of touch as if the role of Software Architects is to psychologically comfort the development staff or (worse) do their job too. Rather than respect the separation of concerns between developers and Software Architects, the agile community have created a narrative that Software Architects are living in "Ivory Towers" if they aren't holding the hands of the development team because... (wait for it) Software Architects have nothing else to do. The Governance, integrity, and veracity of systems development, operations, innovation and improvement are considered part-time exercises if considered to exist at all. The fact of the matter is that disambiguating development roles from software architecture roles would be a wonderful start of a new conversation. This, of course, would make certain agile evangelist's minds explode. The "ivory tower" of creating accurate eco-system diagrams, creating and revising system roadmaps, business process definition and constraint, prioritization, technical project/product co-ordination, technical debt-remediation, multiple levels of system definition and decomposition, and son and on are what lazy, useless Software Architects do when they are hiding from their local "agile" coding responsibilities. You wouldn't know any of this listening to the many videos presented here. It is a shame.

[@unev]

Can you suggest any resources to educate myself on the topic?

[@FrankKrasicki]

Too late. Architects have been reduced to little more than a flavor of yet-another-developer. Waste of time.

[@marcelofm80]

What a bitter world :)