The talk for this year’s Tech.Ed was ‘Challenging the Role of Architect’. The talk is about the fundamental gap that exists between the approach and skills that Architect’s commonly display and what is needed from them to effectively deliver projects. To do this I discuss the outcome of the late 10 years of CHAOS reports produced by the Standish Group and use this to point out just how badly we are doing as an industry. From here, and with a clear understanding of what a project actually is and how pure Agile is not a suitable approach for the development of projects in a way that meets the need of the business, unless the project is running in Fairyland (where cost and time don’t matter). With a solid definition then of what is needed to deliver projects effectively it is then possible to proceed on and examine how an Architect can assist to ensure that projects are delivered successfully.
The talk was, interestingly, met by two types of feedback, which was expected – those that understood the big picture need for Architects to be jointly responsible for overall project delivery and those that saw that the role of the Architect as a senior developer and the project management and process aspects of the role as therefore not belonging. You know what camp I am in.
The deck is available from my SlideShare account here.
I’ve recieved a number of questions about the talk, and I’ll attempt to answer these questions here so that everyone can see the answers.