What do software architects really do?

0164-1212/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jss.2008.08.025 * Tel.: +1 604 8275654; fax: +1 604 822 5949. E-mail address: [email protected] To be successful, a software architect—or a software architecture team, collectively—must strike a delicate balance between an external focus—both outwards: Listening to customers, users, watching technology, developing a long-term vision, and inwards: driving the development teams—and an internal, reflective focus: spending time to make the right design choices, validating them, and documenting them. Teams that stray too far away from this metastable equilibrium fall into some traps that we describe as antipatterns of software architecture teams. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.