97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

Chapter 78. It Takes Diligence

Brian Hart is an executive consultant with CGI, a leading IT and business process services provider. Brian is involved in the architecture and design of J2EE applications primarily in the state and local government sector. He has been involved in the software industry since 1997.

—Brian Hart

AN ARCHITECT'S JOB IS OFTEN PORTRAYED as an activity focused on ingenuity and problem solving. Ingenuity is a key trait of successful architects. However, an equally important characteristic of the activities of a successful architect is diligence. Diligence can manifest itself in many ways, but ultimately it is an exercise in perseverance and paying the right amount of attention to each task and each architectural goal of the system.

Diligence goes hand in hand with the mundane. Successful architecture practices are in many ways mundane. Effective architects often follow mundane daily and weekly checklists to remind them of that which they already know academically, but fail to practice by habit. Without such mundane checklists and reminders, architects can quickly fall into software time, in which no measurable progress is achieved because a lack of diligence allowed the architecture to meander and violate known academic principles. It is important to realize in these retrospectives of failed projects that in most cases it isn't incompetence that drove failure, but ...