Fundamentals of Software Architecture

Chapter 22. Making Teams Effective

In addition to creating a technical architecture and making architecture decisions, a software architect is also responsible for guiding the development team through the implementation of the architecture. Software architects who do this well create effective development teams that work closely together to solve problems and create winning solutions. While this may sound obvious, too many times we’ve seen architects ignore development teams and work in siloed environments to create an architecture. This architecture then gets handed it off to a development team which then struggles to implement the architecture correctly. Being able to make teams productive is one of the ways effective and successful software architects differentiate themselves from other software architects. In this chapter we introduce some basic techniques an architect can leverage to make development teams effective.

Team Boundaries

It’s been our experience that a software architect can significantly influence the success or failure of a development team. Teams that feel left out of the loop or estranged from software architects (and also the architecture) often do not have the right level of guidance and right level of knowledge about various constraints on the system, and consequently do not implement the architecture correctly.

One of the roles of a software architect is to create and communicate the constraints, or the box, in which developers can implement the architecture. ...