Fundamentals of Software Architecture, 2nd Edition

Chapter 24. Making Teams Effective

In addition to creating technical architectures and making architecture decisions, software architects are also responsible for leading the development team and guiding it through implementing the architecture. Architects who do this well create effective development teams that work together closely to solve problems and create winning solutions. While this may sound obvious, we’ve seen too many architects ignore their development teams and create an architecture alone, in a siloed environment. When this architecture is handed off to the development team, the developers often struggle to implement it correctly.

Making teams productive is one of the ways successful software architects differentiate themselves. In this chapter, we introduce some basic techniques for improving development teams’ effectiveness.

Collaboration

All too often, the software industry treats architecture and development as entirely separate activities. Consider Figure 24-1, which compares the traditional responsibilities of architects to those of developers. Architects are responsible for activities like analyzing business requirements to extract and define architectural characteristics, selecting architecture patterns and styles to solve the problem domain, and creating logical components. The development team uses the artifacts the architect creates during these activities to create class diagrams for components, build UI screens, and write and test source code.