Becoming an Architect

I’ve taken a rather straight-forward route in my career on the way to becoming an architect.  Writing code, leading development efforts, doing a little project management and consulting.  I believe that it is the collection of this experiences and a little training which has lead me to my career as an architect.

How do I define what an architect is?  This is consistently difficult.  But I would respond, I know one when I see one.  I think it is impossible to be an architect without experience.  I think an architect must be able to identify where successful patterns should be used and when an unsuccessful anti-pattern is about to be used.  An architect should be a good communicator, translator, negotiator, and leader.  And I think a great architect will not just understand, but really embrace all of a stakeholders different points of view.

The International Association of Software architects (IASA) has identified 7 primary skills of software architects.  This library contains many documents which demonstrate real-world application of these primary skills.  It is an excellent source of information for those who wish to understand how an architect thinks and for those aspiring architects to review.